STAR TREK BEYOND FOREVER
by Ellison Spinrad
Summary: As Jim Kirk and Carol Marcus fall deeply into crazy, passionate love, they're swept into an impossible mission involving the Klngons' sense of Manifest Destiny, time travel and space combat, all of which undercuts Jim's sense of identity and turning Carol into his salvation...
1. Chapter 1

**Beyond Forever**

 _prologue — part I_

She knew she was Carol Marcus. Everything else was cotton, mud. She had to have been drugged, had to have been — she could feel it in the heaviness in her arms and in her legs, in the unusual taste in her mouth — but she couldn't remember how and certainly had no idea why or by whom. But the sickly wooziness was lifting, replaced by an unpleasant growing sense of sleepy resignation. She fought it — she knew she was good for that — and memories flashed at her, some dim, others stark. And there was an awareness, too; certain of itself in aggravating fits and starts. They had been at the Ithian embassy, she was sure of that, on Gethsmeni….

They were members of the Starfleet contingent…. for the Governor's Ball, the next to last night of the annual Starship Captains' Summit. And she felt they had enjoyed themselves, too, enough for him to make bad jokes about it…. he always has a joke…. like his make believe annoyance at how easily she worked the room, that she was familiar with and introduced him to so many political elites and artists known to her through her sophisticate mother…. her mother…. that cool smile of disappointment at the choices Carol had made…. and the upper echelon of the Fleet, retired military noteworthies and explorers with historic pedigree — ancient Archer, Admiral Emeritus April, Garth of Izar, through experiences with her dad…. her late—

And she remembered getting him up to dance and that he was surprisingly adept and graceful — dashing, even, in her mother's parlance — and, unsurprisingly full of self-deprecating nonsense and mischievous charm…. intimate charm…. with his damn diamond blue eyes, eyes ocean blue that could pierce her steely resolve, and his full lips, a mouth that so easily could break into a smile, a smile of encouragement for his crew, a come hither grin at her…. but eyes and a mouth that could quickly turn him hard with anger at an intractable adversary and, worse, at his own own human failings and doubts that she wanted to kick him as much as kiss him…. She'd done that once, kicked him then kissed him in a friendly fight….. early on…..

The gentle strength of his arm around her, when they were leaving the Americas Club on Xunan, after one too many drinks and that high spirited fight about— what had it been about? There was a sweet tentativeness, the way he ran a strong hand down her bare arm and slipped it 'round her waist, drawing her just a little closer…. He was going to find her — wherever she was, whatever had happened to her and she hated that she felt so weak and needed him but he was going to find her and pull her from the cotton and mud because there were other flashes of memory, lurid, overpowering, these were flashes of terror — abrupt, roiling terror….

Large bodied men, muscular brutes, pushing around her, pulling her, their skin made into shades of green flickering in the ornamental coloured torch lights' vapours, bald heads, tight black top-knots, bodies of muscle pinched with brief black leather straps more for lewd decoration than fighting gear, revealing sinew and hard flesh, leering green faces. One of the men— Oh, God, no! No torchlight illusion, their skin was green. Not men, not human men…. Orions! My God, Slavers! — grabbed her! He locked a thick limb around her upper arms, pinning them easily, helplessly, to her sides as as he kicked out and thrashed and was jerked off her feet in her suddenly maddening high heeled boots. Carol sensed more than she saw the electric green whoosh of the Orion transporter beam as it swallowed her whole but she managed to cry out before the meaty hand off her captor clamped fast over her mouth— "JIM!" He would come for her.

Carol knew it.

She knew Jim Kirk.


	2. prologue -- part II

_**prologue part II**_

Ensign Chekov had been as good as his word. With a quick turn of thought he had made the dicey calculations allowing a single transport through a rudimentary scrambling shield and had dropped the Captain in a shadowy corner of the Orion Pasha's, Klimt's, ostentatious bivouac headquarters in their camp just outside the Capital. At least the Enterprise Captain figured it was the Pasha's tent, the decadent old statuary and expensive, thick throw rugs suggesting the traveling arrangements of a wealthy, self-aggrandizing monster. McCoy's bio scans had pinpointed her but Mister Spock's infrared sensor mapping of the target area had only told him so much, however, and Jim Kirk found himself feeling lost amidst the light silks and heavy canvas of the labyrinthine tent. More than lost — frustrated, angry.

Of course he was angry with the depraved, duplicitous Orion cheiftan Klimt and his coterie of broad backed body guards who looked carved from jade and had executed the abduction — green bastards had handled her so rough, so goddamn— he'd seen that much and could do nothing.. And of course he was angry with Governor Breck and the lax security he'd arranged with the Ith at their embassy considering the event's notable guest list, enough so that he'd made a dumb joke about how a drink spiked with explosive Nitrex would leave Keenser the only thing qualified to run the UFP to which she'd qupped the little thing couldn't do much worse than what was already in charge. That made him laugh. She could do that to him. And he was angry with his old Academy classmate Merrick, now a Federation liason with the Governor's protocol office, for not insisting hard enough for a proper Starfleet lock down at what was, after all, a Starfleet Officers' Summit.

But who Jim Kirk was angriest at most was Jim Kirk. For not being there for her. For allowing anything even remotely like this to happen… to her… Carol Marcus was as strong-willed as any woman— as any one — he had ever known. And she possessed a keen physical strength, as well; that magnificent lean, taut body still reflecting her teenage athleticism that had made her a silver medal Olympian — she had thrown Jim himself around more than once kickboxing in the ship's gymnasium. And, despite the growing distance she felt from her judgmental mother and the deathly betrayal of a father she had once adored, he knew she still felt a strength of the soul; she had told him over drinks that long, hot and lazy evening at the Officer's Club on Thetis that if she couldn't believe in the essential decency of others she might as well just run for office. And she got him to laugh. But none of that mattered when it came to her present circumstances as he imagined them and couldn't help but kick himself for.

These were Orions — slavers who took women as commodities, sexual pets and servants, and were brutal and cruel and had carved this into their hedonistic, criminal culture over two thousand years. Klimt had worked an invitation to the Governor's Ball only because he of all his homeworld's ruling class had co-operated with the Federation, facilitating joint mining contracts and even securing the release of human settlers on Dinari where Klingon jihadis had held them hostage. Jim knew that Carol hadn't actually been charmed by the gluttonous exotic with his stretched lobes displaying heavy ruby studs. She was just following her mother's tutelage by demonstrating easy politeness proper to the social circumstances. God, she could be too goddamn proper! So when she'd pleasantly agreed to let Klimt take her on a quick tour of the embassy's rare Ithian art, he'd just given her a look, that look she called "the Captain's look" — somehow judgmental and trusting at once and entirely full of himself.

She'd angled away from Klimt and told Jim in a low, clear voice — her Brit always sharper when she laid things out for him — that she'd only be a few minutes and that she then wanted the mysterious surprise he'd promised her once they cut the Ball early and she'd said it with that big smile that always lit him up and he kicked himself all the harder as he slid past another canvas flap in the tent, down another tunnel of off-white cloth.

The wind had picked up across the surrounding desert and the tent swayed, its upright braces creaking. Klimt's private army was gathered somewhere chanting and singing to swirling, passionate, driving music, firing weapons off as they laughed and there were unnerving screams — the screams of women. Jim's pulse was racing, his mind was racing in ways he had thought he knew how to tamper and control to be the leader he was in difficult situations but with every gust of wind, every furious snap of canvas stirred by that wind, every Orion ululation of victory and celebratory volley of meaningless gunfire, the panic of losing Carol, of literally losing her, was nearly overwhelming and he hated himself harder because he was becoming angry at her. Not for being taken; she'd clearly been targeted by Klimt as an Orion prize. By their standard, she was the exotic — they were inured by their voluptuous, black-haired "animal women." Carol, so fair and blond, hard-bodied with long dancer's legs and slightly mismatched wide bright eyes… God, he was angry with her…. for making him care so much about getting all the details right of his silly surprise for her once they escaped the Ball… for that aching stare he'd caught her giving him, settling back in the Chair, after he'd taken Chekov's shoulder in hand and explained what had happened to his brother Piotr at Klingon hands on Archanis IV.

She'd given him a different look at he sat at the bar in the ballroom, nursing a brandy, running details of the surprise, watching her as Klimt walked her along a row of strange, moving oils… she'd rolled her eyes — just enough to draw a smile from him and she'd broken out laughing to the Orion's confusion.

The next time Kirk glanced over, they were gone.

Kirk felt the brandy burn off as he pushed past guests, knowing she'd understand his finding her, joining them was a pretext and that once she understood what he had arranged for them the next few days, she'd be— and then he'd found it. On the floor, by a toppled chair. Her initials stenciled small in silver in one corner, the clasp carved with the Enterprise seal, Carol's slim black leather clutch that was de rigeur for her formal dress uniform that looked damn near perfect on her — but it was all scuffed up… and that lovely but overpowering aroma? Jim popped the clutch open and found a small bottle of Elasian perfume, her favorite — and his — crushed open. Jim felt sick, a lump in his gut and time smeared…

The tall french doors leading to the embassy portico ajar — a flagrant disregard of basic security protocols — drifting open and shut in a light breeze… dashing outside, past carved liquid busts of past ambassadors… hearing one fall and burst ahead and slipping through the detritus, rounding a corner… and then, "JIM!" He saw her struggle as green swirls curled around her, as she fought the man-beast a good foot taller than her who pushed his hand over her sweet mouth, another of the brutes yanking her head back with a pawful of her bobbed hair. In that instant, he knew she had seen him with eyes, one blue, one subtly not, that implored him as they faded with her outline in a wash of green and an echoing hum. Then there was just the desert wind and distant music from the ball. Kirk needed no time to think— he had no time. he pulled his communicator from the inner breast pocket of his dress grays…

"Kirk to Enterprise! Beam me up! Kirk to Spock! Come in, Enterprise."

"Mister Spock, Captain."

"Beam me up now! I've got a goddamn job to do."

"Yes, sir. And Lieutenant Commander Marcus?"

"Now, Spock, dammit! Now!"


	3. Chapter 3 Deposition: Carol Marcus

"Someone of your smarts and character, you'll find some of this ridiculous and redundant, but for the record—"

"Oh, no. Of course, Lieutenant. I understand. Marcus, Carol, W.B., Lieutenant Commander, service number four-oh-one-seven six-five-six SEC-three-nine A. Currently assigned USS Enterprise under Captain James T. Kirk, Science Officer, Special Sciences, Advanced Weaponry and New Technologies."

"Lieutenant Commander, you do understand your appearance before this inquiry is entirely voluntary. The Enterprise is due to break orbit in seventy-two hours, after the Summit's closing events, and you must be anxious to return to duty."

"Our mission schedule is the Captain's concern. If I'm anxious, Admiral Nakajima, it's about resolving this matter as quickly as possible. This is my third deposition so I really have no idea what more I can offer."

"Lieutenant Detmuller from JAG assures me he won't waste your time. Lieutenant?"

"Thank you, Admiral. Lieutenant Commander Marcus… 'Lieutenant Commander'… Lieutenant Commander, you've made a mess of my data recorder. Most of your records and— numerous— citations list you simply as a first Lieuey. When did your promotion come through?

""About a week ago. Two days before we arrived here on Gesthemeni for the Captain's Summit."

"I see— and… congratulations."

"Thank you."

"Rather remarkable, don't you think? Being promoted so quickly, only one year into a long course mission. Who signed off on it?"  
"Starfleet did, Lieutenant. I presume the Science Services AG and the admin board."

"But it was Captain Kirk who signed the request itself."

"As he does every promotion going to Fleet from Enterprise, yes."

"In fact… according to your, uh… file here, Captain Kirk's signature's all over your paperwork. He was the initial signatory recommending you and your primary sponsor along with XO Spock for Sciences proper, Doctor Leonard McCoy for Medical Science and Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer, signing for computer mothership Tango and weapons, Alpha and Omega. All the big guns, so to speak.—"

"Mister Detmuller, will you please bottle the acid."

"Admiral Donneghy, I'm trying to establish a pattern of favoritism on the part of Captain Kirk for as of yet unknown personal reasons toward the Lieutenant— uh, Lieutenant Commander, I'm sorry — that lead directly to the situation under investigation and which, if not overtly criminal on the Captain's part, are likely deserving of censure—"

"Censure?! Jim saved me— Admirals of the Board—!"

"'Jim' is it? Well—!"

"How dare you, Lieutenant?!"

"Lieutenant Commander, as you were. Mister Detmuller, this is a deposition, questions and provable answers to determine fact — not a courtroom. Not a playground for presumption. If you wish to continue with these… ideas, I suggest you pursue them with Mister Kirk at this afternoon's deposition but, fair warning, even then you'll be kept on the straight and narrow. Understood? Good. Proceed."

"Thank you for your understanding, Admiral Harmon… Lieutenant Commander Marcus… This is no judgement on you— you were clearly the victim here, subjected to such terrible… humiliation outside your control… but what precisely was your situation when 'Jim' rescued you?"

"Christ. Detmuller, LC Marcus has answered that in her first written report and under duress and… humility at her first depos—"

"It goes to the heart of what was in Kirk's head when he did what he did—"

"Admiral Donneghy, I'll answer. If it helps expose the cruel sickness of the Orion Oligarchy and prove the honor I feel serving with James Kirk to Lieutenant Detmuller's precious satisfaction, I'll answer…. I was, uh— I was… I was bound— and gagged— I was— tied up— To be— They were planning to, uh— Oh, God.."

… as Carol's senses finally found shape and color and dimension, so too did her awareness — her circumstances.

She was stretched supine on a heavy rug of gold and green, all around her rippling canvas, dark teak, blazing torchlight. She started at a leering face looming in the flicking red light — Klimt! A grotesque bust of jade on a short, fat pedestal. But Carol didn't panic. Not right away. Panic could come later… when there was nothing else. For the immediate now, there was more than just the effects of whatever had knocked her on her ass in the pulsations through her extremities, the simple fact that she could barely move at all. She ground her wrists together and felt the sharp tightness of thin strong rope tying her hands. Her hands had been pulled up high behind her back, almost up between her shoulder blades, and a similar coil of rope pinned her upper arms sharply to her sides, criss-crossing her chest. Carol's ankles had been crossed and bound and cruelly jerked up with a thicker, elaborately wound cord, tied off around her restrained wrists. With an angry moan, her tone's muffled uselessness told she'd been gagged with cloth, knotted, the knot shoved behind her teeth, drawn tight and tied off, pulling back the corners of her mouth in a small, painful grimace.

Carol twisted against her bonds only to feel them tighten and gave up the effort as a waste of energy. The panic finally rose but she beat it back with her combat training and common sense. Even if she were to free herself, what could she immediately do? Where could she go? She had had no sense of how long she'd been out, no idea whether she was anywhere near the Ithian Embassy, and the Ball, or if she was still even down-planet on Gesthemeni at all. As much as she hated the idea, she knew it best, for now, to behave submissively and await her captors' next play, assuming it presented no personal physical danger beyond that to which she'd already been subjected, before striking out. And then there was Jim. Wild Card Jim. Her Jim.

But despite those twinges of assurance, no matter how manufactured, Carol was creeped by the growing sense of being watched. And closely. Heavy footfalls made dull by the thick rug came around her and muscled, green-hued calves, ham hocks, in high leather thong-styled boots came into her limited view. The Orion guardsman planted the butt of his stiletto-pike and crouched close to her. He stared at her — leaden eyes — reached down and stroked her thick, bobbed hair.

Softly, with hoarse breath… "Heiche elle va das…"

Carol jerked away, grunting protest.

"Yuli kilkh, eich elle!," the bulky guardsman growled.

Carol glared at him. Blazing hate.

The bulky guardsman squeezed her scalp, wrenched her head. A voice hissed from behind the guardsman, "Maliq fuq, el!" The bulky soldier leaped to attention.

Klimt emerged from behind a curtain, no longer the jovial fop but an imperious Warlord. He was accompanied on one side by his skinny, officious Fool, his aide — more bilious than verdant — and, frighteningly, a green Animal Domme, Amazonian, in silksteel mesh, with jet tresses and a contemptuous sneer. She had a coiled whip slung low on a belt of hooked silver studs and bits of bone. Carol flinched some despite her intent to maintain an even strain as Klimt made a brusque gesture to her and his Fool circled her with a reader, filling her with revulsion realizing he was measuring her — her height, her weight, her figure… assessing her. She glanced up and away from Klimt and his Domme — her icy stare — as Orionii cries and whirling tribal music rolled over the desolate terrain beyond and the Fool reported to his Master in tones and words she could barely hear let alone understand. Klimt nodded in satisfaction. He turned to the Animal Woman, grunting a question, and she replied with steel, slapping the vicious looped lash at her hip.

"Qariq sahi elle, Toqui. Mogt Kir Kesh nebi. Elle sabhi, elle sabhi."

A sick grin split Klimt's face as he came and stood over Carol. And he spoke Basic, his voice fat with self-satisfaction…

"The Lay Seki herself has chosen to make you Her personal hand maiden, esteemed Doctor Marcus, and train you as a pleasure slave for warriors… and gentlemen. You will then be sold naked off the auction block in the elite market of Kir Kesh… Unless I choose to keep you for myself—"

She jerked around at the smash of statuary behind a tapestry, the distinctively male slap-thud of fists on flesh. The Pasha gestured emphatically at her handler — first a thumb back and forth across his eyes, then a dismissal. Carol saw the flash of black leather — a blindfold — as the guardsman tried yanking her away, sliding her from any hands other than an Orions', she realized, and who it had to be and her heart leaped— that's when she finally bucked and struggled against him.

And then Jim Kirk fell into the chamber through a canvas wall, tumbling against an over-muscled pikeman—!

Part Three - continued… "Deposition: James Kirk" 


	4. Chapte 3 pt 2 Deposition: James Kirk

"How long have you been involved with Lieutenant Commander Carol Marcus?"

"I'm sorry? 'Involved"?"

"I think my meaning's clear, sir, especially to a man of you... experience."

"Admirals Harmon, Donnighy, Nakajima... I've had nothing but respect for Starfleet's Judge Advocate General's Office. That is until Lieutenant Detmuller introduced himself."

"Mister Kirk—"

"That's 'Captain,' Lieutenant."

"Captain. Captain, you're known for an unusual sense of humor in difficult circumstances but surely you can answer a straightforward question. How long have you been intimate with a junior officer? You are sleeping with Lieutenant Commander Carol Marcus? Didn't you let your personal feelings foul up your thinking and in doing so, create a potentially ruinous intergalactic incident?!"

"Those are three questions, Lieutenant. You want me to take 'em one at a time? Otherwise you will have trouble keeping up."

"Admirals of the Board, permission to treat Captain James Kirk as a hostile participant in these proceedings?"

"You bet I'm hostile. You bet I am. I'm being goated for issues of Federation policy and I'm being denied any explanation—"

"'Goated,' Jim? That's a little extreme. We're here to assembled your side."

"My side? It seems to me there shouldn't be any sides here, Admiral Nakajima. We're Starfleet."

"Huh. Well, I'm just a simple lawyer… Captain. Some of us can't afford the moral superiority of being judge, jury and executioner in matters of interplanetary importance, let alone over a, good-looking subordinate."

Detmuller never saw the punch coming.

******************************

Kirk's hurried return to the Enterprise after Carol's brutal abduction was met by his crew with typical brisk professionalism. Anthro dug up everything on the Orion femme slave trade while weapons scrambled photons for their kidnapped Section Chief, running Alpha level quickdrills. Sulu and Scotty moved the ship into interceptor orbit prepared for any ship moving away, particularly the experimental high speed Syndicate SF-one elevens as Uhura sorted the noisy comm traffic of a particularly busy Conference of cultures. And Bones managed to isolate Doctor Marcus from the smattering of human females in the Orion camp, their most likely target, from her internal vitals and his signature stitching of her once-injured femur. And Chekov managed the near-impossible, though he cursed himself for managing a single, one-time only transporter penetration of the Orion camp's light tachy-shield. But it was Spock who typically surprised Jim most, agreeing without argument to a one-man rescue operation — though he thought it should be him going. Kirk assured his friend that it was for that very reason that he go alone, that no one should deal with any fall-out should his actions go haywire. None the less, Kirk agreed to what he expected to be called onand so authorized his Exec to contact Federation representatives and the Starfleet Commandant at the Ball as soon as he was well underway.

As Jim leaped onto the transporter pad, Scotty at the control panel called to him and tossed him his phaser. Jim tossed back his formal cap, cursing his stiff dress grays. Bones caught the cap and declaimed,"For God's sake, make this fast." "Easy as pie, " Jim said, forcing his assured smile, "Pie?" asked Spock. "What does pastry have to do with a kidnapping?" "He means it's a standard operation — which it's not. Bring 'er back home safe Jim, you and blondie both."

When Jim first spied her past the Pasha's curtains, his blood boiled. For a beautiful young woman as proud as Carol Marcus, being held this way, restrained against her will, was abhorrent, a humiliation. His boil settled to simmer to best deal with the realities at hand. There was only one pikesman handling Carol, and the Pasha himself leering over her with what was likely his bilious Fool-Secretary. Even the fierce green Animal Woman, a Whip-Mistress, Kirk felt he could easily dispatch. More difficult was the elaborate, painful and ritualistic way Carol was tied up, gagged, how tight it all was. He'd need time and isolation. And a thin sharp blade — then Kirk felt a heavy hand clamp his shoulder, spinning him around as he drew his phaser and had it belted away!

Kirk found himself staring at a heavy-chinned face with no nose. Just as the Orion barked out, Jim slugged him hard twice across the mug, left and right. The guardsman round-housed the Captain back who double- fisted the Orion. No-nose staggered back against a statue of the Pasha Klimt, that tumbled and loudly cracked. Kirk lunged the dazed Orion. No-nose grabbed him and pushed him back into the heavy tapestry of the Pasha's chamber.

Kirk got tangled with both the thick cloth and the Orion pulling himself free. The Captain and his attacker danced the chamber throwing heavy blows, Jim bloodying the Orion's noseless face with a quick stab of open palm. He glanced at Carol as she tried to fight off her handler's anger with her. Carol's eyes flashed madly, warning Jim who was very briefly distracted by her state of bondage, how to free her He turned just as no-nose slapped him, shoved him. Jim fell back against a strong, distinctly female body— never got a chance to look close at her and speak. A length of coiled leather pulled tight around his throat and he choked, strangling, as she held him fast. The Pasha came up, smiled at him sickly. He nodded at no-nose who rushed the Captain, jabbed him in the kidneys— once, twice, a third. When Jim fell, breathless, in sharp pain, consciousness fading away, he pushed himself up on an arm and the Orion Warlord kicked it out from him. Kirk gurgled, collapsed and tried to get back up— Couldn't. No-nose bent over the Captain raining punch after punch and the Pasha was all gloat…

"We originally had plans for you, Captain. A player in our political gamesmanship with you Earthers, losers on a stacked battlefield in space." The Warlord turned and crouched, all ugly smarm, addressing Carol now, up close as Jim listened, suffering for her helpless anguish. "But he's now a problem, your handsome Bull. So, now instead of leading your fleet into hopeless chaos, he'll entertain my camp by being made to crawl and beg for his life." The Pasha ran a lazy, lusty gaze over her bound limbs... "Then I'll chop off his head in front of you." The Pasha pulled a heavy wand from his belt and shook it into a gold-studded scimitar of sorts. Two more guardsmen joined no-nose and Kirk more sensed them than felt them, still dazed, as they jerked him to his feet and dragged him from the chamber.

"Gran'et elle gambelle," the Pasha ordered, chuckling as the Orion handler and the Animal Whip-Mistress began tearing at Carol's dress skirt and jacket and blouse. Jim heard Carol's clothes rip, Marcus' angry, gagged harrumphs… sounds that would have otherwise been her haughty strength, her womanly, feverish contempt. Those sounds were Jim's sharp sense he'd lost her, failed her. Jim and the woman he could only now admit to loving locked stares and though his abilities were only returning now, her look was giving him even more strength. Then a black leather blindfold was pulled over Carol Marcus' eyes and buckled smartly…

The Orions had no idea how strong a Starfleet Captain could be though. He'd never crawl but Kirk would suffer a single scimitar blow, for his ship, for the Federation, for her. Carol Marcus would be,made a pleasure slave, suffer a million little, ignominious deaths if Jim didn't just do what he had to do for her — the odd hints of their Oligarchy's politicking and war-making notwithstanding. The Enterprise Captain abruptly shook himself free, with cool rampaging madness, from no-nose and the other two guards. He grabbed the Klingon-styled disruptor from one of their bandoliers and bathed the hall in wide fire— the Pasha's secretary and no-nose went down and the Pasha scrambled away with his razor-scimitar. The tent had caught fire and Jim adjusted the disruptor, tossing it like a grenade into the flames. The explosion concussed the camp as he rammed the two other guardsmen together who swung back, howling..…

Carol Marcus' uniform had been half torn from her strong, lovely body. Her handler looked up as Kirk charged into the chamber with a heavy blade, a curved pike., taken from one of the soldiers he' dispatched. Fear blanched his olive green skin as he pulled a dagger and slung it at the Captain. It twanged, dug deep in a wooden column, and the handler pulled the Whip-Mistress away, to the next canvas doorway, as the She-Beast coughed and sputtered in the thickening smoke. Jim tried to pull the knife loose — couldn't — and, dropping by Carol, he tugged off her blindfold. Her face dropped at what she saw. "I know, sweetie. Take it easy, take it easy…" Jim's starchy dress grays were soaked slick in blood — both red and green… His nose gushed, his hard strong chin cut open…. the Orions' guardsmen had clearly put up a fight and lost their own blood., by the amount drenching him they'd likely lost their lives. Jim's fingers sought to pull the gag from her mouth when they heard the Pasha bellowing from the doorway,

"Human animal! She's mine!"

"She belongs to no one," Kirk answered with clear-eyed certitude.

The Pasha rushed Jim who swung the curved pike and there was just a flash of sharp steel, green chunks of flying meat, a throw of thick, olive blood… and the headless doll-body of the Pasha dropping to the floor. Kirk hoisted Carol into his arms…

****************************** ********** ******************************

"My navigator managed to punch a wider hole in the Orions' shield and Mister Spock lead down a security team— The report's straight-forward from there—"

"Captain, Lieutenant Detmuller's yeoman just contacted us from sick bay. He will be pressing personal charges of assault."

"As well he should, Admiral Harmon."

"Jim, no joke."

"I agree. I took a poke at a greenhorn when he was intentionally provoking me. I'm too old for that nonsense, sirs and madame."

"Captain Kirk, you said it yourself. We are Starfleet and your command makes you flag of the line. Off the record, Kirk, you don't accuse the Admiralty of scapegoating in open court. Not when we've made lee way for you in regard to intimacy with an officer and looked the other way when it comes to affairs of sex and decapitating a literal head of state."

"Off the record? Angela, what is this bullshit you Admirals and Fleet Commanders are running on your poster boy when it comes to Orions carrying Klingon disruptors and promising to enslave the woman he'd do anything for?"

"You're dismissed, Captain." 

NEXT : Prologue Part I V


	5. Chapter 5

Kirk was dark when he left Security Admin. What he'd assumed would be a fair discussion, an exchange of decision-making ideas, even a plan, military, economic, to remind the Orions what Starfleet was and what its people were capable of, had turned into an interrogation, and a sometimes mean-spirited one, courtesy, primarily, of the ambitious JAG man, Detmuller. Whom he'd briefly sent to Base Medical. With a simple single tap to the jaw. Jim knew he'd pay for that one but he did not understand such vitriolic judgement from his higher-ups, borne of their mysterious, ultimately meaningless, arcane politics, no doubt, but it lingered.

Meeting Carol — as they'd planned rolling out of her bunk aboard _Enterprise_ that morning — for drinks at at the Captain's Summit "Officer's" Club, following their depositions later that day to compare notes, he'd be there for her any way she needed him. She'd naturally receive the Admirals' and, hopefully, the JAG's sympathy for her trauma at fearsome Orion hands and their dizzying, sick plans for her, but laying out the details again would exhaust and humiliate her. Also, because he knew, though he'd likely be rightfully blamed for ignoring regs, even to free her, she'd be there for him, too, in all things because it was her wont generally (such was part of his fascination with her, a genius in advanced weaponry with as strong a capacity for empathy as he'd ever known) … and because of how longingly, he was sure, she felt for him. And he for she. That was why he was annoyed by the impersonal simplicity of a message left for him on a private reader waiting for him at the Club: "Returned to ship for personal matter. No need for your current attention. Take care. C. Marcus." Part of her goddamn father's legacy, that's what that was - - anger with herself for allowing anything to happen beyond her control.

Lieutenant Commander Carol Marcus, in tight black, a sports bra and calf length shorts, worked the heavy bag in the the lonely gym of the ship. She'd always kept her body as tight as her thinking since her teens when, already studying at Oxford, she prepared for both Olympian swimming and equestrian events, in the water for the Yanks, riding for the Brits in the ancient, still sports-lively slang. Right now, each punch and kick came from a different tightness — every skillful slug of the bag and she was left thinking of her comm conversation with her mother following her deposition. June Wallace was attractive, in her mid fifties, thin and small, bird-like and bone polished with a clear-voiced, genteel, Upper West Side mid-Atlantic accent. "Carol, my dear, what you've been through, no human woman's been through that." June had several recommendations for her independently-minded daughter, to help her through; esteemed psychiatrists — all experienced in severe psychosis and stress. "Mum, I have Jim," Carol laid down defensively, the last word, knowing her mother's feelings, the Grand Dame of UFP charities herself, of the boy-commander's "insufferable self-importance". "The Captain? I see." Her opinion of Jim Kirk was in the ice. "Well, darling, I'll brook no objection to one of my legal team's expertise in making sure you're done right by. That, I insist upon." "What do I need a legal team for, Mum? Who told you—?" A man in his early sixties smoking health weed replaced Carol's mother on the secured comm line. "Doctor Marcus, hello. My name is Aaron Satie." Carol was familiar with the influential civil liberties attorney. "Now, we have much to discuss but first and foremost, short of ship's technical business, you are to stop speaking to Captain Kirk immediately, on every personal level, even to say, 'hello'." Carol's controlled fury, her skilled combination of furious jabs and roundhouse kicks on the heavy bag, a whirling flurry, would have laid a Klingon _d'k tahg_ Dancer flat.

Bones met Kirk in the transporter room and McCoy convinced the Captain to a martini mixer of his legendary Finagle's Folly. Kirk caught on that Bones pointedly ignored his exhortation they round up Carol for drinks— and approached McCoy's cabin. "It was unbelievable, Bones, the attitudes of the fine members of our graduating Academy class," Kirk said with straightforward displeasure. "Their… opinions. Let's just say, it was some cocktail hour at the "Officer's" Club…." …

"I thought by now ah'd-ah find you hangin' from the highest yahdahm." Stewing over Carol's impersonal note, Jim Kirk had immediately recognized that old-fashioned, New England State o' Maine. "Aye-uh," the youngish, pretty-ish woman, nodded with a shadow of a smile, just barely tall enough, five-two, five-three, for her fit, carefully muscled tri-athlete's body or her Captain's bars.

Jim had turned, smiling a gentleman's smile. "Still haven't developed a sense of humor there, Cat? I thought last time I saw you, you'd got the knack." Captain Cat Dunbar, USS _Akula,_ was a few years older than Jim but had shared her notes for their final essay exam at Academy Command School with "the kid from the Ioway fahm." She'd found him damn handsome, classically so, but felt no desire and, instead, held an older sister's care for both his natural leadership and his capacity for self-destruction.

"Circumstances as bad as ah've heard?"

"Why I joined the Service. Even our gossip shoots for the stars." He glanced at her heavy tumbler of whiskey. "What's an unappreciated hero gotta do to get drunk?"

"Or laid?" chimed in another voice Jim recognized, as Cat signaled for a round. Another female voice, throaty and sensual but light and dancing; turned away, at the bar, behind Cat, she glanced back at Jim over her shoulder with a raise of those sharp dark eyebrows, that carnal smile more appropriate to a teenage girl, than the intimidatingly over-qualified psychiatrist assigned to turn him inside out that first year commanding the _Enterprise_ before Nibiru. Way before Carol, he reminded himself.

"Helen," Jim said, greeting the shapely brunette. She turned in a tight, blue Starfleet R and R sweater with a deeply cut Vee neck, black Capris and non-regulation heels. "I'd heard you'd transferred from Tantalus back to active space duty." Helen had the Starfleet arrowhead Delta stitched in the sweater's hip, an attention grabber, and above her Commander's stripes, the patch worn by the small crew of Cat's _Akula_ : a cartoon Great White's sleek body and dorsal fin, and for its pec fins, warp nacelles as chopped and channeled as those of his ship, and the saucer section hull that suggested a spearhead in place of the shark's head. "Well, you make a good fit for the _Akula_ , Doctor Noel. For one thing, it's a flying death trap—"

"Kirk," Captain Dunbar groaned, warning him from a subject she had no time for, not from "the kid from the fahm" and his unrelenting sense of what he found funny. "So help me—"

"And then there's your new Captain," he nodded in mock-conspiracy at Cat, "She has what they call in your game, issues. Yeah. The _Akula_ needs a good headshrinker. Yes, she does."

Jim winced, looking away, recognizing Helen's wide grin as a response to his past flirtations and kicking himself. Helen sipped her gin cocktail, shaking her head.

"I always hated you calling me that, Jim. And what do you mean, death trap? Didn't your current sweetie pie, your flavor of the month, have something to do with its design?"

Jim glanced at Cat who saw the "help me" light flash in his eyes. The _Akula_ had been the final prototype okayed by Admiral Alexander Marcus, that is before the _Vengeance_ , and he'd assigned his daughter to implement her state of the art weapons systems tied directly into the ship's warp drive engines. The _Akula_ 's line were intended to be exploratory vessels, high speed-sustained maximum warp collecting and analyzing data in potentially dangerous unexplored space and, per a secret Section Thirty-One directive, a very fast, heavily armed scout in large scale space combat operations.

"She's the one that has got you in all this trouble. The remarkable Carol Marcus. You're so many things but I'd never have characterized you as predictable."

He started to reply- -

"Doc, cut it out. Jim, listen to me—" Captain Dunbar settled close to him as the 'tender delivered their round in the overcrowded bar. "I'm being serious, honey," Dunbar said in that "older sister" tone she knew, Kirk long remembered, could grab hold of his attention and not let go. "None of us know much of what really happened the other night with the Orions but that doesn't mean a lot of people at this event aren't going to use that against you anyway."

Jim stopped half way to taking a drink, looked at her askance. He had asked her, failing to keep his tone light, "What are you trying to say, Catherine?"

"We've got your back."

"Yes sir, Sir," Helen added with a hint of meaningful bravado.

"Not all of us, big man," a lanky Captain with a West African Coastal accent had said coming up to the bar, signalling for a beer. "Some of us can see through your typical self-aggrandizement."

"Can it, Ogechi," Cat warned the Captain of the comm relay ship, USN _Catallus_.

USS _Kitty Hawk_ 's Special Ops and Ex-Oh, Millie Krakowsi, and her tough guy Yeoman agreeably joined Ogechi. "I have no idea how Fleet allowed your relationship with your own field weaps to continue once it became commonly known to officers throughout Starfleet," Krakowski sneered. "It's as simple as the great Jim Kirk throws a tantrum and—"

"A man has a grown up relationship that's both personal and professional and, y'uh, you make him into a child—," Dunbar mock-marvelled.

"I didn't say a child, just the horndog still thinkin with' what's happening between his legs at the expense of his command. You're good, Kirk; I just guess you're too good for a ballroom full of Starfleet's legends," the _Kitty Hawk_ Ops Chief continued relentlessly. "Y'know? To ask for help?"

Dunbar had flicked looks at her young friend from Iowa — who. she knew, really was as good as his reputation. "Jim Kirk is the commander you wish y'uh'll be. And won't."

"Yes, one of a kind," Ogechi had responded sharply, in all seriousness. "Pirate. Playboy - Psychotic."

"Getting easier to blame you for what happened to the traitor's daughter than it is the green bastards. At least the Oligarchy is a genuine ethos," Krakowski's yeoman piped in, despite basic protocol.

"The rest of us us don't mistake crazy selfishness for genuine bold leadership," Krakowski piled on as Cat Dunbar led Jim and their heavy tumblers of Glengarry away. Helen lingered at the bar observing the other officers' hostility with cool interest and clear dislike.

"What, aren't you going to take a poke at one of us?" Krakowski smirked. "Or just cut off one of our heads for the road?"

Jim had put a hand on Dunbar's arm as she turned aggressively to their Fellows and he maintained an even strain….

Jim was pretty much as surprised by finding Spock in MCoy's quarters, studying on the computer, as he was by the fact the Vulcan was having a Saurian brandy. Clearly, his first officer's and his doctor's need was to speak privately — and they had to be discussing his circumstances. Bones had urged Spock to take things as public as possible and the Vulcan hadn't need much wheedling in contacting their mutual FOC rep.

Spock and Jim's mutual Services Corps Rights adviser sounded what Kirk would later learn was a familiar refrain: Kirk would do himself and career good to simply follow orders; most importantly, for reasons of possibly conflicting legal self-interest, he shouldn't speak directly at all with Carol Marcus — who, the FOC said, off-handed, was likely to be transferred anyway — except in the matter of ship's technical business and her work, and he'd probably hold onto command after decisions made by the Admiralty, given a brief leave of absence.

Kirk threw up his hands, despair almost edging indignation… ultimately becoming pure anger. "I'm going to talk to Carol. I owe her a drink—"

Bones got in his path saying, "Jim, there's more." Kirk looked over at Spock….

"We've been called to Earth," Spock explained, attempting neutrality. "Starfleet has acceded to the Daystrom Institute's request to study our systems after essentially two years."

"Something that could easily be accomplished at, say, Starbase One-Two-One or Mech-center Diablo, Come on, Spock!" Kirk objected.

"Jim," McCoy added as positively as he could, "Some time on Earth would help the crew. Not Carol, least of all."

"Captain," Spock said, standing. "As ours is the most sophisticated computer system ever successfully employed for our extended mission time, for deep space operations. Daystom has always intended such an examination. But, Doctor, really—"

"Really," Kirk said, finishing his first mate's sentence in simpatico, "I think all three of us better stop walking on eggshells. You think I screwed up, rescuing Carol the way I did? Killing that Orion pig- - I mean, the Honorable Pasha Klimt?" The anger still bubbled, but Kirk fell in a chair, accepting Bones' drink.

"Y'all thinking I'd be pouring you my finest kind if we did?," Bones asked. Kirk worked up a half-smile, a nod, but he could read in McCoy's sharp look, and even in Mr. Spock's impassivity, they all had to prepare themselves for futures that defied them.

Carol had fallen asleep with one of his books — after half a bottle of wine, alone — and she could feel him on every page of the antique hardcover he insisted she read when she'd come by it on his nightstand. She saw him in all the stoic hot-doggin' hot rod tests pilots climbin' to "the top a that ole pyramid," daring to be Mercury Program astronauts at the beginning of "the space race" some three hundred years earlier. Jim Kirk, more than any man she'd known, truly had the right stuff. In more ways than one.

The next day, the final one for the Summit and still to be hosted aboard the Fleet flagship despite circumstances, Carol pounded out the vino running the corridors then worked her team for a last minute inspection in case their guests wished a simple tour. As her Weaps deck fell under Engineering, Scotty ran the check but the Captain hovered grimly behind him. They each caught one another stealing glances; she was almost grateful her expertise with torpedo auto-armaments and counter-measures was called upon amidship and she had to dash off without him. And the hurt she felt she was the cause of.

By nineteen hundred, civilians from the Gesthemeni government, the Federation Governor, Neville Breck, and his team, and the dozen ship's Captains and their selected officers were milling aboard the crew lounge, heavily guarded, of the _Enterprise_. And Carol had already had two strong vodka tonics in her cabin before arriving and was feeling them as she nursed a third in the lounge. Jim, she finally was staring at openly and it looked like he felt nothing as he gave a cursory welcome aboard his (he emphasized, his) ship before turning pleasantries to Breck. Carol watched Jim like he was a dangerous animal, one of the few surviving Le Matya, as he stalked to the bar and drank a strong Glengarry. As the Governor finished pontificating, a decent jazz trumpet player from Captain Dunbar's crew, played "Round Midnight" and Carol summoned herself, who she truly was, back to her mental and emotional forefront. She knew that Jim thought she had her own version of the right stuff, a steadfastness. She crossed the lounge toward him.…

They stood beside one another, not bearing the looks they had for each other and what they might miss or mean. Finally, Carol ran her fingers down Jim's arm, aware they'd already received some disapproval from several unfamiliar officers, and he pulled her fingers tightly into his. Carol leaned up against him, whispering through the drink, "I want you."

He looked down at her, uncertain, , "Carol — are you—"

"Jim. I want you. Hard- - Deep inside- - I want- -"

"You want out of here?"

She barely nodded. Her stare was enough. It was that look he caught when he glanced back after welcoming her aboard his ship as one of his officers. He turned, pressing against her…

"Remember that surprise I had for you?"

Kirk's surprise for Carol, set and ready since before the ill-fated Governor's Ball at the Summit, was a private summer seaside bungalow on the warm equatorial coast. They walked barefoot in the low, slow relax of surf and Carol tucked her shoulders under one of Jim's arms. They talked what they weren't supposed to be talking about but soon fell silent. Soon after, they fell onto, into a broad, deep hammock near their isolated lodging.

Jim kissed her, her face and neck, pressing down on her throat and open mouth until she managed, "Take my clothes off." He looked at her, eyes alive with all the pleasures they'd shared but she couldn't help playing, saying, "Now!," inverting one of their earliest encounters that she still teased him about. Still, he took his time with the clingy off-duty formal wear, a tiny black cocktail dress, making her moan and laugh lightly as he wanted, running his hands over her naked body. She was stretched back on the hammock as he, down on his knees now, held and rubbed and kissed her right foot. She ran her left foot, with its little blue-green painted nails, on his shoulder and moved him up and Jim massaged and licked every inch of her. He buried his head down between her thighs, gently biting, working his tongue. Carol took hold of his hair and guided him and he let her guide him, let her have complete control over the both of them, until she was bucking up against him a little and, finally, making hard, high almost girlish stutters -cries cut short — until there were no more sounds to make….

No, no — there was something else… a similar sound when Jim woke, realizing by the shifted star pattern over the ocean it was a good hour later, and, finding himself alone in the hammock, looked around desperately, panicking for Carol. Then he relaxed, catching sight of her, and pulled a long, heavy towel they'd rolled and used as a pillow, around his waist.

Carol was huddled by the small bonfire he'd set soon after they'd arrived, as the water crashed and hushed. She was wearing his overlarge Starfleet pullover she found so comfortable. Aware of him behind her, she fought against the small sobs that choked her

."Carol?" he asked.

"You're such a good man, Jim— They shouldn't have treated you like— they did."

"What is it? What's wrong?"

He came around and sat beside her just as those chokes broke open into messy tears — "Oh god, Jim! The way those Orion monsters treated me— Not like I was someone with thoughts and… ideas and feelings of my own— they didn't c-care— they were— they were going to turn me into an animal!" He grabbed her and held her close.

"Carol, Carol— its done. You're safe. I'll never make any kind of mistake like that again. Never when it's you"

She pulled away but not by much. "You're blaming yourself for this? No, Jim!"

"I let you down, beautiful. I'm not— I don't screw up. Not like that I can't. Now our own are going to take you away from me…. stick you in a lab some place while I count myself lucky to get assigned a first officer's post on a space tug in Earth orbit calling Starbase One home."

She hit him softly with balled fists. "Stop it, Jim." She wiped away tears from her face with the back of her hand as her strength came back in waves. Jim, of course, she knew he wouldn't cry or anything so silly as she'd allowed herself, not since his sacrifice of self to save his ship, his crew, his friends from the genetic mutant Khan and his miraculous return from the dead; he'd just stare out the water, making jokes to coax a laugh 'til the Gethsi sun started its creep over the oceanic horizon. "You hear me? kiddo? We're in this together."

"You love me, Carol?"

"I want the future, my future, with you," she answered, brushing back a stray curl of locks from his broad, thoughtful brow. "You're a brave man to feel about me the way you do."

"No more crying?"

"Depends," she answered with a smile. "Are you going to out do yourself in that hammock? I'll cry Hallelujah!" and Jim kissed her, their teeth clicking, their lips sealing like they'd never say good-bye.

In the small squat, cool living space, Kirk's communicator chirped. Uhura. She gave him frequencies to tune the bungalow's comm-pic and her voice was tightly by the numbers. As Carol poured them ice cold Altair water, Jim asked for the viewer to engage and saw what the Enterprise sensor's were reading, a wavering image: five pinpoints of incoming light. They heard Sulu, Chekov, and the new junior science man, Ashe, discuss the particulars of the lights — certainly not naturally occurring, then facts and figures and, coming to sit close by Jim, it took Advanced Weaponry Specialist Carol Marcus all of ten seconds, tops. "You sure?" Jim asked.

Carol nodded, adding, "That most distant light's reflection pattern gives them away. It's a rear guard giving the one at point a pinwheel effect, an older class S-Vee two-twenty, the array— oh, shit! Look! Attack positions," she analyzed. "Maximum short warp!"

The image flared- - Kirk shifted frequencies on the viewer— found the Enterprise bridge off a security recorder—as Sulu slipped from the Chair to helm as Spock entered.

"Spock—!"

"Captain, my guess is it's—"

"It's an old armored Orion fleet."

Spock nodded, studying the numbers on the reader handed to him by Mister Ashe. "Agreed—"

"Lieutenant Uhura," Kirk commanded, Carol detecting the tonal shifts in his voice as well as a subtle change in how he held his his body, an Olympic boxer ready and eager to dance. "Hail them."

The image of the bridge, his crew, abruptly shook and rocked, inertials screeching, as colored steam blasted through light cracks spiderwebbing the bulkheads.

"They've just started the conversation, Captain. Loudly."

"Mister Spock!," Pavel Chekov barked, his voice steady but carried by his young energy. "They're coming around at five-five-five."

"All hands, all hands!" Spock's voice echoed over comm systems. "Stand by for second attack. Barrage of old style nuclear torpedoes incoming!""

Kirk looked at Carol who nodded firmly.

"Mister Spock," Jim said, "Launch countermeasures. Full spread. Make 'em crazy. Phasers and torpedoes. Light 'em up-" He leaned forward, Carol's gaze flicking between Jim and the viewer.

"Message coming in," Jim heard Uhura say quickly, then adding slowly in her recognizable and distinct tone of annoyance when she was off-comm, "Spock, you aren't going to believe this..."

to be continued: Star Trek Beyond Forever - prologue, part V


	6. Prologue - Part V

Kirk walked up the flagstone pathway leading to Admiral Eleanor Parker's immaculately reproduced American Colonial on the handsome residential strip of the Presidio. The terrain surrounding the house was ersatz-rugged with a beautiful still-valley and man-made river running behind it. It were as if it was a perfect world, this little corner of it, anyway — making this, ideally, for Jim, a perfect day. The Enterprise computer core was being given the once over at Daystrom Orbital; Richard Daystrom himself was rumored to be coming aboard to modify her systems for a series of war games. Admiral Parker's invitation was for "a friendly drink" and, hell, maybe he'd even get the apology that he deserved for Carol's treatment by Eleanor's damn fool of a JAG. That would leave him a Sunday afternoon to find Trout's, the sports bar from his Academy days, and have a cheese steak and an Old Earth beer and watch one of the five home San Angeles NFL games, as they were still pointlessly called, the season kicking just two weeks ago. Then he could grab that thing he saw at the antiques place off Market and Sixth he knew Carol would love and exploit command privilege and blast across country in a high altitude one-seater solo to New York for dinner with her at the legendary Cochrane Arms hotel where they were staying overnight planning their two weeks or so of leave-time travels on Earth.

But it wasn't a perfect world, not even this corner of it. Frisco was one of the last few major Earth cities without a full weather control system. Gray storm clouds were already turning nearly black as they gathered over the Bay. And Jim knew that while Admiral Parkjer's drink might appear a friendly one, he was going to have to tap dance around the Pasha Klimt's headless body to earn it. In fact, in that perfect world, even if he needed to make some redemption to his Commanders, which he was certain he didn't, it would have been him who battled and chased off or, better yet, rounded up that damn Orion armored combat fleet. Instead, once he and Doctor Marcus were back aboard, he was chastised by Admiral Donneghy for leaving the evening early and was assigned to fall back and see their onboard dignitaries and locals safely back to the planet or their vessels while Dunbar on the Akula and Bart Mancuso of the heavy cruiser USS Houston, Old Reliable to those officers whose asses he'd pulled out of the fire and, Jim learned, Carol's godfather, failed at parlay but scared them off at incredible speeds when Mancuso fired no-nonsense across their bows.

Jim rang the old door bell, deep chimes, which was quickly answered by Eleanor Parker's lover, Lana Kind, a grade school humanities teacher and community activist - - hot button dinners with the carefully hawkish Starfleet Commander and her quietly eloquent liberal partner were the stuff of local upper echelon legend. Jim knew Lana would say the same thing to him she always said upon greeting: "Captain! You look dashing. I'm sure you don't remember me."

"You're instantly forgettable, Lana," Jim smiled.

"Come on in. You're your usual punctual self but—"

"But it doesn't mean she's not the Admiral."

As Jim entered the vestibule, he small talked, "The house, the yard, hell, the whole Presidio looks finer than I remember."

"It's taking some hard work but then good things usually do," she replied lightly. "You know, Captain, you're quite the hero in the seventh grade. "

"They're probably smarter than I am these days."

"No joking. And the Admiral tells me enrollment at the Academy has rocketed since your heroism during the Harrison affair and your speech rechristening the ship. Of course, half the students think they deserve the Chair the day they graduate."

"And the other half?"

"They just want to be Jim Kirk. Ah, here she is now," Lana said, looking off. "Eleanor, your guest."

Jim stood at alert, removing his formal uniform hat, tucking it under an arm. "Admiral."  
"At ease, Captain," Parker said a little wearily, offering a hand which Jim took with a strong shake. She was a tall, slim woman, almost skinny even, with salt and pepper sandy hair and a lightly lined face that made her seem older than her years; in fact, she wasn't that much older than Jim, a compatriot of Chris Pike and, like Chris, a protege of Carol's late father, the disgraced Fleet Admiral Alexander Marcus. She had essentially taken Marcus' leadership role in Starfleet, though "on paper" she was Commander of Operations and Tactics, succeeding in the troubling way Kirk recognized in his own career to date:; almost preternatural leadership gifts yet benefiting all the same from historical tragedies, treachery, madness: for him, Nero, Kor, Khan… for both of them, Admiral Alexander Marcus.

"I was hoping we could relax on the backyard patio but I don't like the look of that sky," the Admiral observed. "Meet me in the den, Jim. I'll join you in a couple of minutes. Pour us a couple of drinks. My usual"

It's common in any organization that the higher ups, the movers and shakers, bear particular eccentricities and Satrfleet was no exception. For instance, Kirk had been confounded by Chris Pike's private obsession with baseball — not the pure boyish act of playing the game itself but its stats. He could list ERAs in his head going back nearly a hundred years and making it seem as important as a First Contact. Admiral Marker didn't just collect art and antiquities — nothing eccentric in that — and it wasn't just the nature of her collection: originals only, no reproductions — that was so difficult to figure It was that there was only one criteria: the more rare the better. Kirk, moved through the great den, studied his favorites… a hand drawn chart of the now forbidden Talos Star Group made by a refugee, a little girl aboard a passing deep space Tramp Explorer, a set of shot glasses and half a bottle of Gentleman Jack taken from the quarters of NX-01 Enterprise Engineer "Trip" Tucker, and, the prize, to Kirk's thinking, astronaut Alan Shepard's Mercury program flight suit from his orbital mission on Freedom 7.

"I'm leaving you that in my will," said Eleanor as she walked into the den, heading for the well- stocked wet bar. "I thought I told you to pour a couple of drinks. Didn't you learn Christopher's most profound lesson?"

Jim couldn't stop the genuine grin at the memory as he joined the Admiral at the bar. "Never turn down a free drink when the boss is buying. Two stiff Mugato fingers, easy on the soda."

"That's the spirits," she smirked, not looking at Jim as she poured, saying, "I also thought I told you to keep it informal, Jim. Or uniform casual at most." She was wearing work yard denims and a fresh black tee, her only indication of rank, the Delta of her belt buckle and starred pip.-bar pinned to a shoulder.

Jim smoothed out his starchy stiff dress gray jacket. "No worries, Admiral. I'm good. Ship's laundry says all that blood came out easy."

The Admiral handed him his MacCutcheon's, stone-faced. "Not funny at all, Jim."

"It wasn't meant to be, Admiral Parker." He looked at the Admiral unflinchingly and she held the look seemingly, without any feeling. She just rose her tumbler and said, "Welcome home, Enterprise." Kirk paused with a frown, went to say something, then simply met her glass.

"Thank-you, Admiral," sipping the smooth hard stuff that went down much to easily as he followed her to the siting lounge. Jim took up a big leather Eames armchair across from the Admiral and said what he meant to a moment ago. "Admiral, it's not that my crew didn't appreciate the effort but that homecoming— It was—"

"A little much?"

"Chase craft to drydock? Parades here at the Academy and in Annapolis, Paris, even Riverside? Fireworks for three hours over Luna Hanks?"

"Well, Jim, I don't personally plan these things. I'm just a grunt they gave a good commission"

Kirk let the gross exaggeration pass without comment and simply said, "It just— it all seemed more suitable for when we return after our five year assignment not less than half way through for a routine check of the mainframe and subroutines."

"Five years. That's a long time. You know, I was part of the group that determined the mission's parameters." Jim refused to allow her barest show of a smile unnerve him; as he felt she intended; he maintained an even strain. "Tell me, Jim, do you miss it? San Francisco? Mother Earth?"

Jim pretended to give it some thought, all comic seriousness. "I miss the fried crabs at Sam Wo's, the big ones, the jumbos. And their tea-smoked duck."

She nodded deeply,"Those are some good crabs." She leveled her dark eyes straight on Jim. "What do you really miss? About your home?"

"You know, Admiral, between my two commands, I've been traveling space for just three years but I've either explored or outright discovered thirty two planetary bodies, all of them so different. So strange. On Earth, all I've seen are Riverside and Des Moines and then the Academy facilities here in San Francisco and Annapolis, Georgetown… Everywhere that might still pass as exotic on Earth I've ever gone has been as a Cadet. My first psycho-simulator test in Osaka , orbital jump and S-SEAL training in Iceland and Tunisia stationed off Wight. Life takes each of us in different directions — our own."

"Well, then, Carol should show you a good time globetrotting. I hear you two are making plans?"

Jim replied with careful uncertainty; Eleanor had the unique commander's sense of putting rumors together and wind up with a few basic truths. "Well, Lieutenant Commander Marcus is a Starfleet brat. She lived everywhere from La Jolla to New Berlin to Ho Chi Minh all before she was thirteen. And that's just Earth as she likes to remind me."

"Ahhh, but it's that Sceptered Isle, Mother England, and M.I.T. Duotronic and, our secret - yours and mine - Sak's Fifth on Itixi she considers home." Off Jim's look of mild surprise and curiosity, Eleanor Parker smiled indulgently again. "June Wallace and I are friendly even if her daughter wrongly blames me for her parents' divorce and has hated me since she was seventeen."

"The Enterprise," Kirk said, seemingly apropos of nothing. Eleanor's eyes told him she was searching for a reply. "My ship. The Enterprise. That's her home." Eleanor maintained a cool, distant sense of friendship in her nod, her twitch of a smile. "I haven't had the pleasure yet, meeting her notorious mother. And I'm introducing Carol to Winona if I can find her. Hear she's on-Earth. Somewhere."

"Professor Kirk is promoting her new holobook on unknown life she communicated with in the Hay Drift while serving aboard the Nimitz. Good luck catching up to that lady." Jim fought the grin that twisted his mouth and memories. "But you've been trying that most of your life."

"Ain't that the truth," he agreed.

"Just you mind your Ps and Qs around Carol's mom and catch her cues when to genuflect, and you'll do all right. Actually, you're June's type." The Admiral pulled herself up and took Jim's glass from his hand, gesturing for him to remain seated as she poured another round. "Actually, Jim, I'm happy you found Carol. She's the kind of smart woman you ought to be with, not the… ladies you were famed for in your Academy days or even during your first Command. I have no doubt Carol can even put you in your place when you deserve it."

She returned with their refills. As he took the drink and knocked back a strong shot, he mumbled for her entertainment, "And sometimes when I don't and have to ask for it. But we're consenting adults." He finally elicited a knowing laugh from his superior "Well, we won't be Earthbound long enough for me to see much of anything anyway. There usually is always a next time. Carol and I are both eager to get to back to space."

"That's not going to happen, Jim."

In spite of himself — the bile, the bite — he couldn't help but smile. It was a cruel, self-amused smile he normally reserved for overconfident Klingon warship Commanders at stand-off and the technocratic nabobs who failed to understand the essential nobility of the Federation and whom Pike had warned him about with derision. "If I were to take you seriously, if I'm gonna get spanked for actually saving one of Starfleet's most irreplaceable officers from a life of sexual domination, slavery, even if it meant me killing one of their most honored and also reprehensible leaders…. I might tell you some of the stories I've heard from the survivors of the Kelvin. My father would have been proudly clapped on his back every room he walked into for life if he'd done what I did for Carol—"

"Jim, it's not easy for me to say this. You've accomplished so much in such a short career- -"

"Admiral Parker, the music's over. Time we stopped dancing."

"Captain Kirk, you're finished. Relieved of Command. Disavowed by Starfleet."

Jim stood up and the Admiral matched him. She held back any reaction to the aggressive step he took with cold confidence toward her, his sharp blue eyes the lasers that sometimes unnerved his love.

"Even if you think I screwed the pooch with the Orions — and I didn't — I've had the Enterprise taken from me once before, Madame. I earned my ship back the hardest way there is. And I've kept on earning it with more natural skill than almost any Captain in our history exploring deep space." There was anger there. But Parker remained hard and unaffected.

"No, Captain. This is different. You're done, Jim. Really and truly done. And you won't see a starship bridge ever again."

Carol pounded beneath Jim against the overstuffed mattress of the too-comfortable New York hotel bed, fast and hard and harder still. Her hands meant to grab hold of the bedding but she just threw out her arms and had all the control of a rag doll. Finally, not holding back anymore, unable to hold back, she cried out loudly, gasping. Jim climaxed — it seemed again and again — until he relaxed, practically collapsing down on top of her, rolling half-away as he buried his forehead between her neck and shoulder.

She finally let a long breath of air escape from her lungs. "What's gotten into you?' Jim pulled himself away and laid back.

"What do you mean?"

"Jim, for all I know, you really are the most virile man from Iowa to the Pleiades Straits but tonight — my lord! — you're a man possessed." He muttered, almost to himself as he slipped on a baggy pair of boxers and grabbed their water glasses from her night stand, "You've got a  
problem with that?"

She shook her head and ran a hand through her mussed hair as he crossed the suite to refill their shaken martinis, finding her humor flushed as she said, "It just means I'm going to be the best kind of sore tomorrow—." She arched her back with a sharp hissing intake of air….. "All over."

"And that means I'll have to explore new ways to relax you all over again. Good thing I got a commendation in original thinking at the Academy."  
Jim set their drinks beside her and, remembering something, went to his jacket, still soaking wet from his desolate walk through San Francisco, and pulled out a small, long box.

"You still haven't said much about your meeting with Parker," she observed.

"Doctor, did you know your boyfriend is still the big man on campus?"

"I have no doubt."

"No, really. Our esteemed Admiral says half the kids who come through as Cadets want to be Captain James T. Kirk one day." He handed her the box from Meyer's Antiques and Curios.

"You love to give me gifts. I know there are things you keep buried down deep, even from me, but you definitely don't suffer insecurity."

"You want me to return it? It's a helluva present," he said, reaching to take the box away. She turned away protectively with make-believe girlish petulance, opening the container's velvet lid. Her playful humor melted.

"Mister Kirk… it's lovely. And most sexy. Like I'm your queen." She held up the filigree of almost string-like silver.

"More my Goddess," and he didn't smile nor did he joke. Not a bit. Not at all.

"It looks fashioned from a Stone Elk's antler. That's a real status symbol to the matriarchy on Bell Prime," she said, half intellectually, half filled with wonder.

"It's an anklet," Kirk added.

"I know what it is," she nearly giggled, adding as she raised her left leg and pointed her foot, "Go on, put it on me."

"My pleasure." Jim lay beside her, his body turned opposite hers so that he could clasp the delicate ends of the chain together, running his fingers along the smoothness of her sweet, trim ankles. "Carol," he said and she heard the shift n his vocal stress, something uncharacteristically tentative, almost lost and ready to expose something he only felt comfortable sharing with her. Her lightness drained away but she maintained the warmth she shared with few, mainly with him.

"What is it, Jim?" Carol stroked the bicep of one of his strong bare arms. He sighed in a way that bodily pained her. She usually found it easier dealing with advances in photon torpedo yields and complex countermeasure spreads than this complex leader of women and men in space. Other times — now — his heart was more open to her than, she suspected, to anyone, even his dearest friend of the cosmos, Spock. And together they made real her greatest physical and emotional pleasures, and, he managed like few she'd ever been close to, an intellectual excitement in her search through the secrets of the heart. He hadn't answered her, just stared at her but she wasn't unsettled in any way. She smiled at him.

He grabbed his silken royal blue kimono that she'd taken as something special between them, with its wide cloth sash hand-painted with Klingonii glyphs by an Imperial Brush Mistress and he tossed it to her.

"Let's go out on the balcony."


	7. Chapter 7 prologue - part V (continued)

prologue part 5 continued

It was warmer than even the usual late summer night in New York City. Jim reached out and Carol took his hand letting him draw her close so that she could rest her body against his, the side of her face on his shoulder.  
"Let's live off room service in every grand hotel from here to Dubai to Oauhu for the rest of time," he said and she recognized the sharp blend of earnestness and incipient excitement in his voice, his eyes.  
But she chuckled happily at the thought. "Sounds like fun."  
"I'm serious," he made clear for her. "We'll travel every inch of the world and then one day maybe we can settle down, some place like an out of the way lobster cove in Maine or Juneau and I can write a book about my travels in space and what it takes — really takes — to captain a starship and you can start that research you're holding back from really jumping in—"  
"Jim—"  
"Or we'll take possession of an island, somewhere in the Keys or off Belize or in the Indian Ocean. I'll open and manage a bar with gambling, dancing, great music, food. You can sing that twenty-second century jazz you love- - you know, for fun. It won't interfere with your studies!"  
"I'm a rotten singer. I'll send the customers packing—"  
"You're better than you think. And if we can't find a place on Earth, there's all kinds of available and open life-water on Kalieogigus. You can use your magic and make us an island, you're always going on about using your modified torpedoes for terraformng. We'll get Spock to dot the tees and cross his eyes—"  
"Jim!" She broke in. He was over-thinking at a clip, faster and faster, so much so that if she didn't know him so well he'd seem almost manic. It was like a dream where someone's speaking your language but you can't make sense of it. She stroked his hair lovingly, gently. "Jim— listen to yourself, darling. You're so…. messed up tonight. What's wrong?""  
"What are you talking about?"  
"You've been all on edge the moment I saw you this evening down in the bar."  
"How long were you watching me?" he asked, his hint of anger a pretense he'd know she'd read through.  
"Long enough, " she answered firmly. "What did that bitch, Parker, say to you? Really Jim." Then she finally expressed what she'd worried about the moment that damn Admiral had summoned him shortly after they made Earth orbit, her words coming crisp and sharp…. "This layover isn't the initiation of some bullshit enforced penalty leave? My god, my dad, he— "  
Jim started to wave her off, knowing how difficult it was even now to mention him, but she gathered herself with a small, firm shake of her head.  
"He may have been a— a hardass but, hell, even if it hadn't been me you risked your life for, he'd have made sure you received a special citation if not Reed's Medal of Bravery. You, or me— we certainly wouldn't have to put up with all this…. nonsense— It's damn irregular!"  
Jim looked down and away and Carol tilted her head, saw his turmoil. He was fighting his war again. Inside. Trespassers will be shot. He glanced back up at her with some version of his charming smile — this one clearly manufactured.  
She would have none of it. "I do have some insight on how the Fleet's Admiralty operates - - you know that. Their politicking can be absolutely Ouroborosian—"  
Jim had genius level intelligence scores, Carol knew that ; he never let her forget it and always with a cocky glint in his blue eyes. She scored even higher and used that intelligence as a matter of course. The crooked smile Jim aimed at her now became pained more than it was his usual display of charm.  
"They're a snake eating its tail," she explained distractedly, quickly. "Did they offer you something? Ask something of you to quell the Orion Oligarchy and call off the Syndicate? Jim? We've both gone over the White file on the Orions' culture. The details of their so-called "pleasure trade." I'm marked now. Clan Klimt's property, in their godawful tradition. Their slave. Parker knows that. And she knows you did what you did to keep it personal and spare Starfleet- -" My, gods, she thought as Jim took a step back and grabbed hold of her upper arms; who's sounding nearly manic now—?  
"Eleanor's just being Eleanor. You know her better than I do. Spanked me is all, like we knew she would." Carol pulled away from him, turning to him and taking hold of his jutting chin between a thumb and forefinger. Jim smiled inside, didn't show it - - she always made herself very clear when she wanted the hard truth - - her Brit was coming on strong - - and wouldn't be thrown off by his humor or bullshit, recognizing only his well-earned sense of command. "I told her it was wrong, Donneghy calling off the Enterprise off when Klimt's attack ships ran their parade. We agreed to disagree. She wanted to let me know she's going to be transparent for the Ad Astra holojournal interview. I told her I'd do the same; she suggested that wouldn't do you— or me —any good." Kirk shrugged as if to ask whether she was satisfied. She just stared at him, nodding just a little. "What time did you tell your mother we'd be in Dover tomorrow?  
"I've got our shuttle tickets for two in the afternoon. I spoke to Mir; she'll pick us up," she mumbled, her thoughts regarding his bouts of moody, self-imposed loneliness elusive; she realized he'd hope to cause her to move off from the darkest mood she'd ever seen him sunk into…. sitting surrounded and alone at the bar earlier. "Jim, let me help," it was more than a request; it verged on being a plea. Kirk pushed her chin up firmly, nuzzled her throat. Damn, she thought, he really wants to throw me off my game…. and knows just how to do it…..  
"It's hot," he said., a weak distraction that was hard to disagree with.  
"Oh, god, yeah."  
"How about we have a cool…. refreshing…. shower?"  
"Make it a warm-ish bath," she said. "We'll take our time."  
Kirk puled away a little and now there was nothing forced about his grin. "If I know you, Doctor, you're going to fall asleep if the bath is just warm enough — and I'll have to pick you up…"  
"Dry me off…"  
"Lay you in bed."  
"That'll probably wake me up again…" She returned his grin. "And if you don't get it right, I'll be doing the spanking." Her grin grew more mischievous. "Actually, whether you get it right or not…"

Jim ran his hand under the water pouring into the deep tub, finding just the warmth that he knew, from experience, was hers. As he worked on his drink, he concentrated on just the whoosh of water and there was no Eleanor Parker or any other Admiral, or any JAG office or Orions or the headless body of their corpulent, criminally hedonistic gang boss - - there was just Carol Marcus. Only Carol. Carol who, knowingly or not, had helped make him a man who'd had - - even with the support and disagreeability of Spock and Bones and Nyota - - a hard enough time discovering he was truly an explorer and leader, someone also capable of simple honest desire, emotional truth and even, occasionally, outside of command, selflessness. He sprinkled the running water with the bath salts that provided a healthy, alive but sleepy feeling.  
And as the granules fell and floated and were swirled into patterns reminding him of distant stars and nebulae in deepest space, there were a tumble of images he couldn't pretend didn't exist…. from an Admiral's den on the Presido across the continent and only hours old…. the third and heaviest tumbler of McCutcheon's in his hand….. Eleanor's thin, drawn face darkening in his mind into something like a skull as she laid out just what killing Klimt had really done, the details tangling but the inevitable outcome…. ominous…. her promise to see that Carol would not fall into either enemy's hands but that the Enterprise would likely fight its way into the thick of things without him, her Captain…. and a hasty decision to take on a mission essentially alone…. a mission he could barely understand now, only that it would accomplish…. what had she said? Salvation? He'd shaken her hand - - nothing would be written down or input - - and she poured yet another round….. and there were documents, plans, codes to memorize on a chip that would purge itself clean in twenty-four hours, and holographic blueprints - - the target was a monster, surely beyond the enemy's current technology but perhaps that explained the Orions' involvement - - she assured him would be updated before he left in a few weeks time as complicated pieces fell into place…. a few weeks, only with Carol… only a few weeks with her whom he'd sworn not to speak a word of what he had committed to ensuring she was kept safe…. Carol, whom he….  
"How's it going in there?," he heard her call to him.  
"You know me, lady. Gotta be just right when it comes to you."  
"Uh-huh…."  
Carol had her long legs curled under her in a fat, heavy easy chair before the open doors of the balcony as she sipped the third martini he'd poured for her…. or was it the fourth — the only way she could, for now, allow the satisfying natural pleasures they found in each other to blot out the pain he would not share. For now. She took a long drag of the health-weed and blew into the warm night… that goddamn woman, Eleanor Parker; Ellie, her goddamn fool of a father called her from the start- -! Damn her, her hard done by sense of moral certitude . Carol had hated the bald ambition of the officer growing up and never understood her dad's enthusiastic mentoring. She also hated the fact that experience now made her at least, to a degree, understand Parker's decisions made in regard to her kidnapping and Jim's fevered reaction; that despite her status in Star Fleet, Parker had to answer to the leadership in the Orion sector and, likewise, influential cliques within the Federation Council whose refusal to explain their political maneuvering to either her or Jim amounted to probably more than the old adage about bullshit rolling downhill. No, as her Captain likely suspected and she felt certain of, he was being temporarily busted for his exquisite soldiering in mounting her rescue — a ballsiness of individualism being currently frowned upon at Academy Command School. The old guard, she was sure, was unnerved by Admiral Parker's commonplace joke that every young man wanted to be James T. Kirk and every woman… also wanted to be him as well. Carol had no doubt that he'd eat well and make the best of a desk in Annapolis but even if it took a week or two longer than his mates first feared, he'd soon be back in the Chair, Spock and Leonard on either side of him and Carol diligently at post. That is if what she was keeping from Jim - - her secret - - could be handled just as well…  
Months earlier, on a lark, she had submitted to the Federation's Science Council a bare bones project proposal from her private research. She was more than surprised, when it became known that Enterprise was returning to Earth for computer analysis, to be contacted by Deborah Daystrom, Dr. Richard Daystrom's sister and Operations Executive. In all that time, Carol had shaded the truth from Jim, who knew, as a scientist, her mind was always busy and her research was just likely busy mindwork, nothing too serious. She hadn't shopped and lunched with friends in Baltimore as she'd told her man but, rather, Daystrom had provided transportation to their facility at M.I.T. Duotronics. She was disappointed Dr. Daystrom himself was unavailable but Deborah made his wishes known; that her weapons systems could be applied to her nebulous theories about planetary development, population freedom and food production and that once her tour aboard the Enterprise ended, she was more than welcome to develop these ideas with the Institute. In fact, Dr. Daystrom was willing to silently have her transferred to his team based at the Aldebaran Colony as soon as she wanted and he'd make certain she kept her Star Fleet credentials and service record active. Carol told Deborah she was honored by the offer and looked forward to discussing the project with her brother in depth and face to face, though she needed more time to prepare something worth his interest; in point of fact, she had no immediate interests or plans about leaving the Enterprise - - not after what she'd just been through and felt the need to prove Jim instincts the right ones. Nevertheless, she was elated when she arrived at the Cochrane Arms' fashionable, old-styled saloon— and then she saw him. And the utterly ghostly look of despair that now painted his normally handsome look of good cheer as he stared through the holo'cast of an NYC NFL game and knocked back the hard drink. She'd seen him drunk before, and angry, even almost self-loathing and full of hate but never bleak as he clearly seemed now, lost. Parker clearly had attacked what he cared about most, his command, his ship, maybe even her. Whatever they'd done to him, and the opportunity the Daystrom Group offered her, and her choice, would affect an already roller-coaster of a future.  
They'd joked about that future — the everyday married things a couple of space heroes would have to deal with — but when they treated that future seriously and living together, sharing a cabin, they were stuck with having to get the permissions of various anonymous protocol officers. Getting married? Possible but, at present unlikely, and they'd each be transferred to different starships by old-fashioned tradition and practicality.. And both had problems with the idea of marriage, as well with having children as their own pasts, different in the details, were strangely similar in their dysfunction. Still she imagined the curly haired adventurer who'd pop up in her dreams, of a boy or girl Jim would find joy with in sport fishing for Red Gar on Denobula, a kid who would impress married Spock and Uhura and eternal bachelor Uncle Bones at Christmas parties with a four year old's understanding of both symbiosis and the basic battle principles of a deceleration. A child who would make their love whole, give it shape and a laugh. Their love… had she ever said that to him, outright plain and simple, as he recently had taken to, though she felt she'd always been quicker in demonstrating it. Had she ever just said, "Jim Kirk, I'm in love with you and I think I always will be."?  
They were in the tub for over an hour. Carol laid back against him, the hand holding her drink resting on his upraised knee. Jim moved his hands up and down her body, lingering wherever she made a soft sound. She didn't quite remember him sweeping her up in his arms and drawing him against the cut of his strong body in the water then out of the tub. "I really do love you…" Her words, like her wakefulness, drifted in and out - - were barely words at all - - as she reached and curled a hand against the back of his neck and the last thing she saw was his profile as he stretched her out on the big bed, sat by her and stared hard and lonely into open space.


	8. Chapter 8 prologue - part VI

prologue - - part VI

Miriam was laughing a little too much at something he'd said - - nothing intentionally funny, just something in passing, about how she'd won over his first officer by having him threaten to keelhaul the Vulcan at warp - - as she helped him into his vintage black leather flyer's jacket from the "Apocalypse" Division of America's WW III USN. They were at the front door of Wallace House as Jim was getting ready to leave with Carol. Watching from down the hall, Carol shook her head at Miriam's predictability, her flirting. Jim had exactly the qualities that her younger sister found most attractive. Handsome, manly but just boyish enough, an ambitious Star Fleet officer bound for glory, history, and he was one of a few men Carol had ever been clearly, absolutely taken with.

"It's reassuring to know that some people never change." Her mother's voice was breathy, airy, a little affected but steady and self-assured. Carol turned with a kindly but somewhat tight look at June Wallace, petite with a work-out body. "That includes all my daughters."

"I don't know, mum," she responded. "Spinning Earthward from orbit aboard a spacecraft in flames, or being tracked by a pack of carnivorous Capellan razorbacks with hive-minds, those things have an impact on a girl—"

"I know, dear. I mean—"

"Oh!" Carol interrupted right away. "There was also a time, recently, when a sovereign potential ally of our people kidnapped me and kept me bound and gagged for purposes of sale into slavery. There was that- -" June stepped up close to Carol, levelled her with a gray-eyed stare.

"My daughter Carol remains one of the strongest ladies I know and she shouldn't sell her mother short either," June said. She slipped an arm around Carol's shoulder and drew her away from the others, from Jim. "Carol, I'm only ever going to say this to you once. Understand?"

Carol lost her resolve a little, felt her shoulders slump as she realized no point to objecting to her mother's problems with her Captain and her man. "Yes, mum."

"Your Captain may well be as I've always said, rather full of himself but… he's more than earned that and he's also a genuinely charming son of a gun. He's shown me more than enough respect — something my own brainy offspring is sometimes derelict in doing — and he strikes me as the rarest of a rare breed, a man who can naturally lead both green cadets and seasoned officers. He knows and understands his space politics and he was able to put a smile on my face at the same time — just not quite the kind you wear whenever you talk about him."

"Jim commands not just any starship. The Enterprise is one of a kind and that's because of him. Her Captain. But— thank you, mum."

"Both of you tread carefully, though. My associates with an immediate ear to the echelon warn me that it's up in the air as to whether your Captain receive the Soyuz Star-and-Cross for Conspicuous Gallantry or the business end of an Orion sharp-blade squad—"

Carol was about to answer with indignation when Jim interrupted them with a likeable natural swagger, coming up beside Carol. "We'd better get back to the hotel if we want to get going for that early shuttle from Kelvin-Heathrow."

Miriam joined them eagerly. "Why not stay here over night? I'll make sure you get there on time. You're more than welcome, Jim"

"I'm sure we are," said Carol with a frozen half-smile as Jim turned to her mom.

"June, it's been a memorable night. A real pleasure finally meeting you."

"And thank you, James. For everything. Most of all for saving my daughter's life."

Jim approached June, nodding his head… and grabbed her upper arms, twirling her 'round and setting her down with a quick peck to the cheek. "Any time. Your daughter's one in a billion and means the world to me ."

Carol had buried her face in a hand, holding back her laughter at the taken look that overwhelmed the redoubtable June Wallace's haughty, matronly propriety.

"Carol?

"Yes, mum?"

"He's a keeper."

"Told you she'd like me."

For thirteen days and nights, they rode the whirlwind. Scotty got away from the Daystrom people crawling every centimeter of Jim's ship, his engines, and joined the Captain and Blondie, as he and McCoy had nicknamed Carol, bringing along Ensign Chekov, for his "education" on a proper Aberdeen pub crawl.

"This beer, Guinness?" Chekov said more he asked on finishing his third pint.

"Forget the curry, Pavel," Jim said. "That's a meal in itself." He raised his tumbler of scotch at his navigating whizz.

"You do like it, don't you?" asked Carol, curious about the young man's thoughtful, faraway expression. He's on his way, she thought happily.

"It's wery much like the soda ve drank as children in Russia. But not so sweet. Bitter."

"I told ye, laddie. Y'get one "varnink" with your teenage brand of nonsense when it comes to fine drink."

"He turned twenty a while ago, Scotty," Jim said, throwing an arm around his engineer. "Our boy's growing up."

Later, when Carol slipped away to the bartender, ready to quietly put the night on her credit line, the stout woman with red-brown-gray hair shook her head. "This one's on good, ol' Monty."

Carol looked back at the three men knocking back shots of Antarean "stim." As they chased the alien insta-drunk, Scotty held up his pint glass and pointed toward Carol with barely a glance.

In the Free Republic of Dubai, Jim taught Carol, with her riding experience, to race camels; Jim had never actually ridden one before, either, but had led the Kilian brigade on Dakaaq in a charge on a gulla, like a camel in the way it moved and kicked and spat. They climbed part of El Capitan "til rainfall forced a wild, anti-grav descent in freefalll. They danced and drank and Carol had to pull Jim from a Carnivale street party gone fight-berserk in Rio. They dove deep and swam through the Caribbean and marveled at the colourful tropical fish, some quite monstrous, transplanted to Earth from far away planets with compatible waters.

Jim assured her, as they sat at an isolated patio bar, overlooking the Atlantic on the coast of Belize as sports fishermen arrived and headed out in high, competitive spirits, that he'd been in contact with Admiral Komack and that the Daystrom people had requested a little extra time to finish up thoroughly which gave them a few extra days for their planned road trip. He told her they'd end up in Riverside so that she could see where he'd grown up and he'd put out word through channels to get his mother's attention. First, he had other plans….

Jim borrowed a reproduction grav-steady sports car, a Ferrari, from an old friend, a fellow midshipman aboard the USS Cape Canaveral, from Jim's second year of Command schooling, Walt Waldowski, living in Old Houston, working admin on Starbase One in Earth orbit Jim bombed along open road, testing Carol's nerves with dangerous speeds on hidden turns but she sat straight and calm and when they slowed at a hovertrain crossroads, letting the kilometers long warehouse vehicle pass, Carol asked if she could take the wheel. When they stopped to refuel and recharge almost two hours later at a service station that would have taken any sane driver almost four hours to reach, Jim turned his head slowly and found her smiling at him, pleasantly.

It was at that station, somewhere between Old Houston and Corpus, that things changed. Jim received what he called a Command Conference comm as Carol readied the car, two young mechanics watching her from close by, asking about the unusual make just to have the attention of the blonde beauty with the sweetly shaped legs . When Jim returned, she knew they'd have to at last have that conversation; the bleakness she saw in him at the bar in the Cochrane Arms had returned. He hadn't entirely lost his sense of humor but he left her to joke around and he just smiled softly and nodded. It was entirely unlike him in her experience; even when she could sense he was in a dark place, he'd still try to ease her worry for him with a joke of some kind, usually one that was dumb and clever at once, throwing in a malapropism in an otherwise legitimately difficult or formal circumstance. When an old pop song, a good twenty years out of favor blasted from the antique juked-radio, she sunk a little into the passenger seat when he didn't join in with her and her, at first energetic, sing-along.

He was short with strangers — waiters, cashiers, even a cop — he'd apologize only to grumble about them once they got driving. She and Jim had planned to drive the States, maybe into Canada, to Nova Scotia and the ocean, but she complained as night hinted at falling, about growing fatigued - - hoping her reasons weren't too obviously the excuse she'd intended - and suggested they find some retrograde run-down Tex- Mex roadside motel. For fun. They could head straight for Riverside the next day or the day after.

She found The Fat Tuna an hour outside Corpus and it looked and felt a hundred years old, much as its yokel manager. After they had checked in to their room, they watched some news on an old holo' Vee and soon fell asleep. The next morning, when Carol awoke, she saw Jim through the large perma-glass sliding door, out on the patio He was finishing some business on his comm; she saw him in time to see that was switching it off. He stood there a moment, leaning back, closing his eyes to the already too-hot sun. She ducked away as he returned.

He threw some water and excused himself with what she didn't find a convincing sly grin, claiming to want to find some local beer. Carol went to a surprisingly well-kept poolside to rest in the sun. Instead she got dragged into a game of hoops with some kids traveling to a new home in Jacksonville and helped their youngest sister on her stroke in the pool. The young girl recognized Carol as one of the most recent Olympics medal winners for two unrelated events in her own teen years, equestrian show jumping and two hundred meter freestyle swimming (It still made Carol grin at Jim's outright laughter at the Princess Fisi of Parnussas Two's confusion when Carol explained to her Highness the trick to winning was keeping her horse's head above the water.) As Carol and the girl dried off, Carol drawing the open stares of the basketball high schoolers, she picked up her chirping comm from her things. It was Uhura.

"…I'm s—sorry? Nyota… Uh, Nyota, what are you talking about?" She listened for — she didn't know how long…. time stretched and snapped like a ship slip-punching into warp… "No… Dammit, no! Aww, uh... my gods..."

That evening they were sharing a rack of sloppy ribs recommended well by the locals, with warm corn bread, Jim washing his back with ice cold beer at a ramshackle saloon near the motel. They'd attracted attention the moment they'd walked in, partly because they were not only stranger but notably, attractive strangers,and Jim, consciously or not, had the bearing of celebrity. If folk didn't know him by name, they none the less knew a hero when they saw one from somewhere. He made some small talk once his name circulated the room - - "Wait, you're that James T. Kirk, the one who saved the Earth?" "Yeah, twice, in fact. Once before I was even Captain. Second time, I died in the process and came back to life- -" Carol saw he wasn't quite joking, that he was almost talking to himself and nudged him sharply in the side— and he signed a few autographs but his moodiness kept people at arm's length and they were wont to leave a man to himself.

He was distracted, watching the Austin NFL team play on an old-style three-dee holo 'caster, drinking more cans of beer and, giving him his space, she chatted with some locals. Despite the prevailing, long-standing shared world view, regionalism everywhere, in all the Earth's nooks and crannies, was still common and Carol's accent sounded as offworldly to some of the locals as those born on Beta Centauri. They found it appealingly funny that she called their jukebox "cowboy music."

She tapped Jim on the shoulder and with a twinkling smile, nodded to the dance floor. He pulled himself up with resignation that first dismayed her… but then she saw a genuine smile escape him as he swung her 'round to the music. As one of the juke songs ended, an old piano with a young bearded player tinkled to life and one of the servers, a girl who couldn't have been eighteen yet, joined the pianist, standing by him to applause from locals who clearly took her as a favorite…

 _"I was dancin' with my darlin' to the Tennessee waltz, When an old friend I happened to see I introduced her to my loved one, and while they were dancin, my friend stole my true one from me…  
_  
Carol buried her forehead against Jim's chest and he tilted her face up, leaning in to kiss her mouth. She pulled away.

 _"I remember the night and the Tennesee waltz, Now I know just how much I have lost…."  
_  
"Honey, what is it?" he asked.

"You."

"You have me."

"I—," she cut herself off, buried her face against him again.

"What? What do you want?"

"Shut up and dance with me."

 _"Yes, I lost my little darling the night they were playing the beautiful Tennessee waltz_ …"

She relented to him and he drew up her look, kissing her a long time, long, wet with her murmuring his name again and again so that she thought she might need to sob… and explaining to herself that, if it came - - her tears - - she'd just have to explain herself later that night.

In their motel room, she and Jim lost themselves to almost teenage impulses, having to water down the sharp peach liqueur Jim bummed from the manager and their hands and mouths were all over each other. Jim pealed away her fashionable baggy, cotton tennis shorts, his fingers finding and feeling the fitted lace of her lingerie and one of her hands moved up between his thighs, taking authoritative hold of him. But if their bodies were alive like a couple of kids making newly passionate discoveries, their actual words were decidedly complicated, adult. She asked him about how he'd really beaten Spock's version of the _Kobyashi Maru_ — the stuff of Cadet legend already — and how she thought that that had, in fact, cemented their abiding respect and friendship. He asked her something more complex still - - if she were alone with Khan, out cold in his cryo tube, and could get away clean, would she pull the plug? Her face clouded but she found herself answering more quickly than she thought possible. "It's strange you ask me that - - good gods, you really know me—" Jim's communicator beeped and he checked the call signal.

"Sorry, Carol. I have to take this."

"No, Jim. Please?" But Kirk had already answered and was putting the room between him and Carol…

"No. No, not tonight… Because I can't… " he said to the other end, an indistinct electronic mumble of a voice. "Because I said so…. Is that so? That's not what I was told this aftern- - I want to talk to her…. Now!"

That's all she got before he was out of earshot and she was pulling her clothes together and pouring more of the stiff Scnapps as she went and sat on the bed. Jim returned and grabbed his leather coat, despite the night heat. "Carol, I have to borrow the car and bomb back to Houston. I"ll be back two hours tops I need the keys, uh, the starter to the car."

Carol frowned and grabbed her handbag from the night stand. As she dug through the bag, she pulled the ring of starters and asked pointedly, "Why are you lying to me?'

Jim reached for the ring as if she'd said something inconsequential, like asking about the weather or driving carefully at night. "What are you talking about? It's just ship's business."

She held fast to the keys and said coldly, evenly. "And what ship is that?"

"Carol- -"

She snapped at him now; "Jim, you don't have a ship!"

He stood over her, looked down on her, hands on his hips. She wouldn't, couldn't be intimidated like that. "I spoke to Nyota this afternoon. She assumed I knew every officer and most NCOs were ordered to report and return to the Enterprise within forty-eight hours. We're launching two days after that. With Mister Spock in temporary command."

He held out a hand. "Would you give me the keys, please?'

"Look, I know you too well to think you're delusional but you're not telling me the truth I deserve to hear. So, I think if we can just talk this—"

"Goddamnit, Carol! Can you for once get past your goddamn sense of high born entitlement and just do what I say? Just give me the goddamn car keys!"

If he were any other man, she might have felt a twinge of fear - - there was real anger in his voice… but it wasn't aimed at her - - he was so clearly broken up inside... for him of all people to speak to her of all the women he knew like that- -

"Is that so?" she asked, holding up the keys. "Is this a conversation you're going to refuse having with me later, like you have all leave, or is that this sense of entitlement that's got such a bug up you?"

Jim swiped the keys away from her. "Oh, we'll talk. We'll talk about Daystrom."

"I beg your pardon? she replied a little astonished.

"Can you imagine how I felt when the CEO of the Daystrom Institute contacts me and thanks me for being so accommodating in indefinitely providing the services of my vitally necessary weapons specialist with classified research of her own devising. Of course I lied to them, told them it would be no problem at all. Apparently it isn't. I mean, what does my starship - - the one, y'know, out there, out exploring beyond known space — really need with an unequaled advanced technology specialist?"

Carol got up and got up close to him. "Several differences, sir, between my… well, all right, my lies, and yours. First, I wasn't making any decision or planning any move until we were well into our post-mission refit- - a refit based on my designs, working with Mister Spock, Scotty, Leonard and, yes, you. That's almost three years from now. Also, I'm not sure what the hell I'm researching. It's so… germinal. Just a dream. And, finally, if it is worth pursuing, guess whose was the only real opinion that mattered to me. Hmm? Any ideas?"

Jim threw up a hand, angrily dismissive. "Aaaah…" He turned and headed for the door. "I won't be gone long."

She called out to his back, "How'd you know I'll still be here when you return?"

He slowly faced her and they said it in unison as usual but somehow, for the moment, anyway, the humor wasn't there. "Because I'm Jim Kirk."

They managed rueful almost-smiles. She added, "Will you tell me why when you come back? Why they took your ship again." She shook her head, "Maybe you weren't meant to be a starship Captain but then I don't know what the hell you would possibly do. You're the best I've ever known."

"Carol," he said. And hesitated. Carol had, back in private grade school read about the so-called "face dancers" of Rigel Kentaurus IV, or "Gorshin," as its discoverer, Captain Garth of Izar, had strangely named it. The "face dancers" were distinctly humanoid, their skin rainbow-hued, whose emotional states, in constant flux, were reflected in the almost hysterical movement of facial muscles; in fact, Carol remembered in a flash, Jim's mother was the Starfleet anthro-officer who performed first contact years lafter discovery- - it was Commander Winona Morrison-Kirk's report Carol had read. Jim, ordinarily, and now, was no "face dancer"; in his most emotional state he'd likely speak honestly while keeping himself light and he might - - might - - in warranted circumstances, cry as he told her he'd done at the dying Chris Pike's side. But everything was generally projected inward, dealt with, and expressed as action. But despite all this, despite the fact that his stare at her was practically frozen in place, she absolutely knew how deeply he felt regarding what he was about to say.

"They took the Enterprise from me because I love you."

Carol looked away, covered her face with her hand a moment, fathoming this bizarre sentiment and knew there was only one response, only one thing she wanted to say - - the one thing she'd never told him cleanly and simply without anything sardonic or self-deprecating, no caveats.

"I love you Jim. Come back to me because I love you."

Jim approached Carol, taking her hands in his and kissing them. "I'll tell you everything." He eased her body back so that she was lying on the bed. "You have my word." He took hold of one of her ankles, her bare foot, and traced over the anklet he'd gifted her. "Goddess." He lowered her foot, gently crossing one leg over her knee to her small sigh. Then he walked to the door and out the cheap motel room without looking back. Carol watched him go.

She wouldn't see him again for two hundred and ninety-seven years.

 _ **End of prolog.**_


	9. C r u s a d e r s

"Crusaders"

"Jesus Christ!" proclaimed the helm amidst the exclamations of confusion and panic. Ordinarily, there was the simple, casual buzz of technical back talk and friendly, mumbled jokes throughout the bridge.

"Keep 'er steady-!" called the Exec. "Captain, do we come about or angle on?"

Captain Herrick, USS Maddox, moved amongst his busy crew. "Contact the Ticonderoga. Get their Crusaders returned to deck. We're pulling back."

James T. Kirk brought up the rear right of the four ship delta vee of state-of-the-art one-man Crusaders. The clandestine nature of his larger mission required he maintain as an anonymous role as possible but his personal nature ran its own course.

"Christ A'mighty!" called one of the squad, Bandit Three. "Torpedo didn't just junk that swift, it vaporized it!"

"What the hell was that? Green flame and lightning?!" asked a panicky Bandit Two.

"Take it easy," Jim ordered reassuringly. "Just the sunlight off a misfire. Roll and strafe then make top speed for the Ticonderoga."

"Hold it, Bandit Four! Bandit One, here—" barked the commander at point!

But Jim had already rolled and was strafing a tumultuous stretch of gray-blue, and the space below in which she lurked. Bandit Three was right behind him.

On the Maddox, the deck officer asked the Captain a clarification for the official log. Herrick replied, "List them as Unknown Hostiles for now. We'll classify those torpedoes when—"

"Sir, incoming! Same projectiles as before!"

At the front of the bridge, Herrick, his first mate and the deck officer held fast to the forward rail.

The torpedo raced at the Maddox, intense, building speed. Like it were a surfboard riding the spume in the burning noon day sun, the gunmetal gray glowed preternatural red, tendrils of green lightning dancing off it at it rose.

"Counter measures… Now. Launch the buoy," said the Captain running numbers in his head.

The Maddox finished its damaged pivot and was plowing forward. From his Crusader, now leading its squad, Jim saw a flash of green as the torpedo detonated as it barely grazed USS Maddox.

Thinking more aloud than addressing the men, he murmured into his open channel, "Herrick had her turned just before the missile was fully armed, hit by the wake—" Then he caught sight of the squad's commander. "Bandit One, Bandit One!"

The last to strafe the open patch of target, Bandit One stalled as he climbed. An explosive burst opened up from the target below, breaching the water's surface, and a light guided missile found a hard line on Bandit One.

Jim rolled and pitched forward. He came in behind the missile and called out, "Break right, Bandit One. Go left." The Commander banked abruptly and Jim recognized the rapidly winking call light on the missile's fins as they split apart. He also recognized the meaning of the unique shape of those fins in a way none of his squad's hot dogs could : sharp, curved blades meant to be wielded by skilled hands. Jim opened up on it with a full spread of his arsenal. The missile imploded, the rippling wave of green energy washed Bandit One, crushing the Crusader's stabilizer.

"Can you make it back to Ticonderoga, Bandit Commander, or you gonna eject for pick-up?"

"Just get me aboard, Jim," Commander Stockdale breathed out loud...

They popped the cockpit canopy with heavy wrenches, two of the Ticonderoga's flight hands, while a third, a kid they called "Toad," helped unstrap Kirk from the seat as he pulled off his helmet and sprung himself to the ladder that lead down to the lurching deck. The Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam was normally a restful blue-gray of junks and sampans; today, the second of August, sixty-four, it was churning as it had so many times in a thousand years, with combat and invasion staging. As Jim strode the length of their needle-nosed supersonic Crusaders, the most advanced in all of America's Navy and Air Force of the era, donning his aviator shades, Toad loped alongside him. Toad was a bit of a naif from some place in southern California - - Modesto - - who pretended at being harder than he was. He had taped his heavy black framed glasses together at the nose.

"Man, oh, man, sir! See them bricks go off?"

"Yeah, Toad, I was there."

"Never seen anything like it, like green lightning. And the howling! Y'ever hear a torpedo make a sound like that?!"

"How's the Maddox holding up?" Jim asked the dumb kid.

"They're saying that the torpedo barely clipped her before igniting. Herrick turned her into it or something, Still, they took a punch to the bulkheads just above the waterline."

"How's Commander Stockdale?' Jim said, regarding his squad's chief.

"They're taking him below for a check," answered Toad. "Wants you guys showered and ready for the dust-up before lunch. You guys were only out there twenty minutes tops."

"Yeah," Jim smiled. "My kind a war. No fun at all." He stopped and looked back at the fighter planes, remembering — or was it projecting — taking his first flight in one of these when he was fifteen. It was under guard and on loan from the museum for the State summer fair. Only a few of the locals were firing at him that time — and he got the worst from Uncle Frank.

"Man, oh man, sir! The way you piloted your bird, there, the speed and the roll, them gookers ain't gonna be writing that in their rags tomorrow. You're just too damn good."

Jim had been privately shocked then just hated those derogatory racial terms since arriving a few weeks ago in this time and place - - felt even more sick when he occasionally had to say them himself to seem of their time and place. Time and place, the elder, other Spock, the Spock whom Jim knew of being from "another time and place" had talked of, indeed, was proof of, how the slightest change or going left instead of right could change things. And also how some things did not change. Commander Stockdale, for instance, Jim knew he survived Tonkin and all of Nam - - twentieth century war trivia, an interest maybe genetically inherited from his dad or old Tiberius. Jim was also struck — again — that he'd have a whole life, either short or long, stuck here in this time and place, thinking about avoiding such things; no turns for him, left or right, just stuck on the narrow straight-ahead. And avoiding memories - - his projections - - of Carol Marcus. Carol, with the the legs and the wide eyes and that smile and the mind that sometimes seemed to move at warp nine in every direction at once, challenging him, making him laugh at himself, but always made good workable common sense—

"Yeah, you got me, kid." Kirk said as the water crashed up and over the deck where flight hands were securing his fighter jet. "Too damn good."

Kirk pulled off the heavy flight suit, showered and grabbed a chicken sandwich from the boys in the Mess, all in time to slip into a seat at back of the pilots' Muster and have Stockdale eat their dust. To be fair, the Commander had acknowledged Jim's bravery and skill in combat for the gathered brass from Admiral Sharp's Seventh Fleet. But that's where the details ended and history began. Their wing group had knocked out the NVN patrol boats, destroying one, but their torpedoes - - how the hell could ratty patrol boats, Swatows, fire, let alone carry, torpedoes; they were gunboats - - were clearly not of the unusual make that had vaporized a few ARVN swifts, smacked the Maddox or, as a missile variant, put the moves on Stockdale. An engineering official announced they'd determine the nature of the new weapons if they could find any pieces - - they wouldn't, Jim knew - - and an apparent civilian in an old fashioned suit, likely what'd they call 'em then? CIA? — added derisively that if the Russians were supplying the North with advanced or "space age" arms, "his people" would know about it. As the meeting broke up, Stockdale, on learning from the Maddox Captain Herrick's yeoman that they'd be joined shortly by the carrier USS Constellation and the destroyer C. Turner Joy and remain just this side of a four mile range from surrounding islands, put aside the standard strategy session for his pilots and with Kirk and the other two wingmen, buzzed low over their previous target on the open ocean. Kirk, of course, kept it to himself that what the silence portended could be read several ways — none good.

He slept off the remaining afternoon and evening. Jet lag and your first jump to warp were nothing like the empty dislocation of time travel and the "chrono-planet," coded Gateway, it's unnerving distant power, it's still entirely mysterious sentient nexus the Guardian of Forever's nonjudgmental omnipotence, couldn't help but render a thinking person small and, at his worst, his loneliest, already made Jim feel that his important mission was meaningless. He cold showered again in the oppressive, thunderous Asian heat, grabbed another sandwich — this one decent enough steak on a crusty hard roll, and went out on the deck. He lit up the Cuban the deck chief had given him when he first arrived and drew in the strange smooth smoke; it reminded him of the large, leathery plants the rodent-things on Dimoros insisted Jim, Spock, Bones and Sulu light up with them to less pleasant effect. Orders for lights out would come soon enough but would be meaningless. The NVA were playing with "victory" crackers onshore, most likely smoke signals of a sort that avoided monitoring of transmissions, Jim thought, and the thing adrift deep below their ships, his target, didn't require a piddly heat signature like a cigar to zero a target.

That…. "thing" out there was more than his mission's target, it was her mockery. Eleanor Parker's mark on him, a dagger in his heart, the killer of his soul. She'd read him like the cheap techno espionage potboilers from the twenty-second century he enjoyed for an escape. But there was no escape from here. Eleanor had really had his number and bent him over; she knew him and had blackmailed him first by stroking his ego. She'd assured him he was the best man for a mission to keep humanity and democratic ideals alive in their time even if it meant giving up his own place in it and likely even his life in doing the impossible. "You're Jim Kirk," she reminded him, quoting Pike. In fact, she'd stressed it was the very abduction of his lover that had proved how time and space worked in favor of those who knew themselves as better than the rest; she had called him, in his defeat of both Khan and even her great benefactor - - and friend - - Carol's father, a kind of futurist demigod with an innate understanding of fate, his life, his death, his life.

And therein laid the ugly, hideous flip side of her blackmailer's coin; it was a threat to Carol herself. Even if Kirk took the "cowardly" way, resigning til he could popularize his personal myths further as he wanted, he'd spend a marked life looking over his shoulder. The Orions, notably Klimt's Clansmen and his eldest son, Karr, had laid claim to Carol; strange, Eleanor suggested, even criminal, but adhering strictly to their taboos was well within the Federation Charter, their pending membership, a non-issue. Dangerous cultural law insisted she was their slave, specifically Karr's, and now considered property stolen by a vengeful killer. It was an impediment to a developing a positive, strong and advantageous relationship with them. the Orion Oligarchy and, by extension, the powerful, hungry Syndicate, that would hem the Klingon Empire in and provide a new avenue for the growing influence of the secret Federation intelligence group, Section Thirty-One, throughout known space to solve mysteries Starfleet wasn't technologically or psychologically geared for. Yeah, she was a student of Alexander Marcus for sure and another reason for Carol to despise her. "This isn't personal, Jim, but you've refused to acknowledge the bigger picture the minute you killed Klimt. Carol, too. And I thought her smarter than that. But you seek true redemption—" Kirk nearly spat at her use of that word — "and take on this mission, you set things right, and I'll make sure nothing ill comes her way. I owe her father that much. And her unique scientific intellect makes her an asset. My asset." He nodded, hating himself, and she laid out the broad strokes. She told him she'd provide details over the next few weeks; he'd only have Carol to get around to maintain his clandestine comings and goings. But all it amounted to were more lies and more self-hatred and Carol, he knew, despite his best (or worst) efforts, saw through him until they had argued in that Texas motel room and he broke her down so she said the words… knowing he'd never hear them from her again. The dagger in his chest. Another way to torture himself, now through the echoes of time.

He leaned against the Ticonderoga's portside rail and pulled the plastic envelope from his breast pocket as ocean spray rained lightly down on him, a harbinger of the storm that gathered at sea night after night. He pulled her small photo, a two-dee black and white repro of the original colored holo — Carol, smiling at something off, when they were drinking on a Hong Kong pier between flights what seemed — Jesus — like four nights ago. He tried to imagine all of time and space on a single one dimensional map, everything everywhere in every dimension impossibly occurring all at once and at the same time, the same pace and he wondered where the Enterprise was, where all of them were….

Spock, his distant but righteously devoted brother, still had demons to fight but Uhura was there for him, and the one mild meld he and Spock had shared, a mission's necessity on Homunculus, revealed Spock's understanding of Jim wasn't just lightly critical and, at times unintentionally funny; it was deep enough for Spock to know now how much others cared for him. The meld, Jim suspected, wouldn't allow Spock to locate him in time and space but he'd likely have a deep feeling if and when Jim's light had gone out of this universe. His other brother-in-arms, Bones, a make-believe cynic, who loved women and booze and the old jazz standards his step mom and "aunt," Starr, had introduced him to in her prime as a singer, he'd hold out foolish hope the longest, convincing himself the wunderkind Captain was always just about to stride onto the bridge. "Bones!" he'd say. "You miss me?" But it was Carol, always staring at him, into him, through him when he needed that, even now in black and white, whose love he'd ache in losing, in breaking her heart when he'd assured her again and again he'd never be far from her- - then the picture shifted, like she had come to life and she was staring right at him. No, it was the shadow of a chummy passerby.

"Wow, sir! Who's she?" gasped Toad. "Holy Moly, she's got be your girl. A guy like you, 'course you'd get a girl looks like that."

"That right, Toad?" Jim asked shortly, going to pocket the picture.

"Didn't mean anything by that. Jeeze! C'mon, can I see 'er again? Please...? Give a lonely non-comm a break."

Jim took a moment, nodded, and not having looked at it long enough anyway, drew the photograph out again

"She a magazine model or something, a pin-up girl?" asked Toad, almost starstruck. "She's gotta be in pictures."

"That's real kind of you to say, Toad. She'd appreciate it. Really." His tone lowered without his realizing it… "It's one of her big hurdles always tripping her up, always seeing the good in people, ignoring the rest."

Toad puffed his chest out a little, adding, "Well, that's the ladies for you. Y'know, she looks a lot like this new movie star from England. I saw 'er in something when we put in at Liverpool before you got this assignment. Please don't tell me your girl's a movie star from England, Juile— Uh, something."

"No, Carol's not a movie star. But she is from England as it happens."

"Please don't tell me she's got the accent."

"Well coming from England, it's part of the package."

"She has the accent."

"She has the accent."

Toad grabbed his heart, feigning a hit from Cupid's arrow. "The accent slays me, Jim. You're killing me here, man."

"You should hear when she sings. I catch her doing it now and then. She has a good voice, just easily embarrassed." Kirk was talking now as if Toad wasn't there, despite his growing familiarity toward Jim- -had he called him by his first name?- - Jim was talking to Carol in the photo. "A very creative mind, she's got. She's taken this popular love sonnet by a poet named uh… Torbolde, Phineas Torbolde — don't worry you've never heard of him, lives far away — and she and a girlfriend who's got a real big voice, they turned this poem into a song. A jazz sort of thing, I guess you'd call it."

"What's the name of it? So when I hear it on the radio I can turn to my wife and say, 'Guy I knew in the service, he married that drop dead good looking singer with the Limey accent."

"Nightingale Woman. That's what it's called."

"Nightingale Woman, I like that. Torbolde?" Toad studied Jim as if from mid-distance a moment, then pulled a silver flask from his back pocket. "Here. Hard stuff. Pinta Old Harper." As Jim went to object, Toad held up a hand. "It's disease free. Made sure it was clean myself."

"I'll get you back the flask," Jim assured him, in no mood to talk much anymore.

"Keep it. I bought like a hundred of 'em before we shipped out from Da Nang for ten cents apiece." Toad winked conspiratorially at Jim with an imitation Clark Gable smile. "Sell 'em to newbie seamen and flyboys for a dollar each. Nice profit, huh?"

"That's what we're fightin' for, son." Jim said with comical nobility. Toad laughed, headed off along the deck as the generator wound down and the lamps stringing the hull slowly died.

"All hands, all hands," called a voice over the P.A. "Lights out. Extinguish all smoking lamps for six hours."

Kirk took a final drag on the cigar and tossed the stub overboard. He stared at Carol's photo, now that he was alone, and uttered so softly, "Dammit." He sealed the photo in the thin plastic and as he pocketed it, he heard something….. Singing. From the direction Toad took, And it was definitely Toad's So Cal nasal. "Toad?'" Jim recognized the lyrics… it was out of his dreams….

"Our love has wings, slender, feathered things, with grace in upturned curve— and tapered tip…" And it was impossible for Toad to know. It was her song. Carol's song, even her tune. He was — goddamnit — singing her song!

"Nightingale Woman," James growled under his breath. "How— no… Toad…. Toad!" Jim ran along the slick deck now wet with rain and into Toad's darkness. "Toad! T—!"

Jim skidded to a stop, looked up to find Toad sitting on the wing of a jet, an obsolete model class up on blocks. He was staring at the night skies, the stars, through the falling rain as the storm built.

"Toad… how could you know that— that song?"

"You're a tough nut to crack Captain Kirk. Surprised you didn't recognize me right away. But I did only meet you once. I guess we're both a couple of artists. When it comes to spycraft, we're too damn good."

"Yeah," Kirk nodded with grim satisfaction. "Too damn good."


	10. Negative Sea Room

**chapter 2 - Negative Sea Room**

It was the loveliest, sweetest and, to him, the most damn near perfect sensation he'd ever known. Soft and gentle and barely there, like the hint of her Elaasian Chanel she'd touched to her body. Then the sensation just that much harder, firm — her lips on his.

"Wake up, sleepyhead."

That musical voice and it's delicate yet unwavering tone with the suggestion of cool confidence, sophistication…. a low-key uncompromising certitude…. As he opened his eyes, she slowly pulled away. Those wide eyes that danced when she was happy. That smile. Leaning over him, the smooth bob of her light golden hair that stood out against the deep crisp blue sky on a warm summer day. She went to speak- -

There were several hard raps on his little cabin's door and they were delivered in a hushed rush. It meant only one thing.

Tonkin, nineteen sixty four— an impossible…. something— a mission- -

"Open up." Jim recognized Toad's dull So Cal twang as his head stopped swimming and treaded deep water. There was a stock still sense of foreboding in the Thirty-One's voice that his casual drawl couldn't disguise.

"Yeah," Jim groaned quietly, pulling himself from his cot and throwing on his O.D. tee shirt. His mind spun, color without shape. Carol, where - -? Had she been a dream? A memory? Desire, plain and simple? Realizing, he groaned with a sickly mix of realization and recognition, snapping to with a Captain's strength, a Captain's clarity, something he'd decided upon after much struggle…. the only way he could do what he was here to do…. There was no Carol.

There couldn't be.

There was none of her confusion about his disappearance, none of the fear. There was no anger and disappointment in her sense of abandonment. There was also no curved softness and muscle hardness of her lovely physical self, the light aroma of her skin, the assured authority of her hands. No airy laughter that could turn earthy-full. No seriousness of mind, one of mental rigor and brilliance. The look he caught her stealing of him after breaking tragic news to Chekov about his brother, it had never happened. No, and there was no Carol with him on Idar…..

Carol could no longer be the sole member of the search team from long distant Enterprise to find him on Idar, in the desolate spike-hills, who threw down phaser fire as she lay across his broken body that had been beat down by desperate dilithium prospectors who'd heard about the price on his head, put there by Klingon agents after his finding Harrison on Kronos - - war criminal Kirk's "murderous rampage" - - and he'd collapsed into a craggy, damp black abyss ringed with off-angle, rocky dagger 'mites as poisonous Hessish welks dropped from from the walls, slithering and squirming at them with ugly, gaping maws filled with rows of poison-tipped yellow incisors, some of them mutations with two or three fanged mouth-holes. As she burned them down one after another with precision, as they sprung at him, weak and wounded, their corpulent-jelly shapes like three feet of diseased human liver, she also tended Jim's wounds as best as her abilities and circumstances allowed. She'd maintained a bedside manner he'd appreciate and respond to — assured, no-bullshit professionalism, dark humored with a touch of anger and don't-talk-back discipline.

"You're going to get your ass moving Captain, sir! You godsdamned genius level, full of yourself—! Just when I was getting used to your nonsense— You've got a hell of a nerve, Jim—" She had snapped off a pitched staccato of phaser shots as she pulled the hypo's safety free with her teeth. Spat it out."Stay with me, you, godsdamn smart ass! Jim!"

But the edge in her voice was leaving her, had become reedy, thin at best. Desperate. The no-nonsense disciplinarian choked on her words, The encouraging make believe of those words had even lost their confidence as she weakly prepped and hypo'd a heavy duty pain killer…. "Jim, you died once already…." Those words had turned to mush…. "Once is enough..."

Afterwards she admitted to Jim that Ensign Boone 's report didn't mention how far gone she was when she was first spotted with him, one arm protective-tight across his twisted body, the other locked in place, pointed outward intensely clacking useless phaser-blobs of powerless color. Security had descended with bellicose repelling down the dagger-shaft, Group Chief Hendorf barking orders. Before the team had even hit ground, they were phasering Hesh to ash, most of the fat, flightless wasps burrowing their escape. When Ensign Boone had pulled her to her feet — with her, at first, grabbing for Jim as Security took him from her — she'd straightened herself, running a hand through her hair as a token of presentability, and said in a cool, steady voice that hitched just a little at first, "Ensign, tell your C.O. I'm ready to make my report."

Even her courage, that was gone now. It had never been.

All there was was that, that… thing out there, a mysterious monster of a machine from the year twenty-two sixty hanging deep jn the gray-blue of the Tonkin Gulf on Earth of what was then called Vietnam late the night of August third, nineteen sixty-four. There was another round of rapping on his cabin door as he threw cold water on his face from a stainless steel basin passing for a sink. My god, he thought, they packed 'em in tight, had a real sense of humor promoting military state of the art. Hell, he joked to himself, he was the elite of the Elite, a fighter jock, thanks largely to the kid on the other side of his cabin door. Toad knocked insistently, his casual, bouncy sing-song turning into an urgent hiss. " Jim, we're pushin' it here. We gotta talk.'

Jim went and pulled back his cot's mattress. He grabbed the old, unmarked police thirty-eight Toad had confoundingly slipped him shortly after he boarded a few weeks ago. Toad, whom he'd known all of eighteen hours and had assumed him to be just the eager dumb recruit he seemed, made a comment, unsettling at the time, that he figured Jim could always use something extra in case of losing his service forty-five with what the crew was rumoring to be their carrier's "covert activity" - - in case of having to open up on a threat or are prevented from going hand to hand.

Toad's harsh whisper, left no more room for playing the kid's fiddle. "Sir! Quit horsin' 'round. Lemme in. Now!" The moment Jim had slivered open the door, Toad pushed his way in and past. As Jim slipped the door shut, Toad held his hands up, palms open as a passing signal of civility. "Everything okay?" he asked, seriously concerned. without seeing the humor in it.

Kirk, however, nearly laughed out loud at the absurdity. "Why wouldn't it be?" Now Toad was sharing Jim's grin and Jim settled by nature back into a commander. "Time?"

"About an hour, more or less— well, seventy-four minutes if you're counting. And we are. Hey, any a that hard stuff left in that flask?" As Jim pulled the silver from a back pocket, Toad found two plastic cups and, held them out for Kirk to pour. Falling back with his warmish straight vodka on the cot, his back against the bulkhead, Toad said, "Now, we can afford for you to take forty minutes to pull your shit together, work out, meditate, whatever—" The young Thirty-One j.g., warming to the former starship Commander's deadpan, none the less had responsibilities and, as Jim read him, the edginess in his energy was just this side of panic. "Might as well finish 'er up," Toad's lightness a pretense, too, as he took up the flask, poured another shot— Jim waved him off as the kid went to top him up. Kirk could see from the younger man's growing grin, Toad could guess at the question he knew was coming from his charge.

"Toad, how'd you know the ETA of my transport so precisely? You called her, what, the Nautalis?" Lord almighty. Kirk frowned at the name; "Seventy-four minutes- -?" A mystery gave him a bellyache. "A mission like this plays by its own ear, no pre-arrangements. Too many variables. And if the Nautlis coded you on a mission this important—" he was thinking aloud but, reading Toad's reactions, knowing Toad knew exactly what Kirk was after. "They'd need to go narrow beam. Even given the era."

Toad nodded then shrugged it off. "Too risky, yeah. It would still have to get to me and only me somehow." ( _"My, gods… I'm mind gaming with James T. Kirk_ ," his enthusiasm an easy read for Jim. )

"I'd think a cloak 'round 'em would make 'er easier, stealth, they were calling it. But it was drawing board stuff at the time. If the Nautilis became compromised—" Toad watched Jim's mind take one of its storied leaps… "No. That must mean…" Kirk knew the implications and they were actually personal. "You're seriously telling me you're wearing a senceiver?"

Toad had become an absolutely smug bastard. "We don't say you're wearing a senceiver. You are one."

Kirk was up and pacing, staring hard inside. "Carol was in on the early development team," _(there is no Carol… there is no Carol_ )…. "The Science Council threw everything, all her hard work, out the airlock after they'd abandoned the proposal, the technology, as too research heavy, the investments too prohibitive."

"Well," the Thirty-One operator said, considering the implications, realizing there were none — just the deadly grim reality of Kirk's mission — "Doctor Marcus was completely honest with ya, as far as she knew. That is, as far as things went. There were the regs. Yknow, nondisclosures. And Sciences did put Ludwig on ice for a while. That's what they were calling the senceiver early on, 'Ludwig'—"

Jim had had enough of this nonsense and cut Toad off with a wave. A short little wave, but tight, and geared to take charge. Jim registered the Lieutenant's deferral — he was still the Captain, even if he'd had to relent to Eleanor's disavowal of him from Fleet for the record and public shaming with the press… and, even then not for two hundred and ninety-seven years, now, his time. "So, Section Thirty-One and Science Council patrons go to bed together for mutual advantage. My guess, considering Carol's rare talents, is that all of her most advanced work that was sent to Daystrom and the Cochrane testing grounds on Alpha Centauri for supervised R and D was actually handed over to Section Thirty-One privatized science labs where it could be quietly weaponized."

"I'll give ya this much," Toad reverted to his casual swabbo friendliness. "Your Nightingale Woman believed in taking on the impossible."

"Yes." Jim's tone became airless, heavy. "Yes, she does…...

"Well?" Her smile sweet, the cocking of her head entirely mocking in its innocence, she prompted, "It's your move."

Jim was down to a baggy pair of black swimming trunks—oh! And the tags on a silver string that he'd kept from the Groom Lake fly-and-fire tests as a Cadet. As he studied the game pieces on the tri-boards carved-from-Boar Eels' tusks, into the exotic hydro-Avian stalkers and fishers of Canopus, where she found it for him at a lake-market, he put on the one smile that he knew effectively swung her up in his arms. "Don't tell me. You're distracted by my muscular, manly physique?" He made an intentionally silly look of seduction toward her as his fingers took up a Rook advanced it to level two— no! Three. More daring. That's what the citizens of the Federation expected from him dammit! She flicked a look at him, cool and pretend-testy, the icy, beautiful blonde Brit making her indifference, her imperial haughtiness, convincing and, to him, strangely compelling. If it weren't for the telltale little crease hinting sly humor dimpling the right corner of her lovely mouth….

"No fear, Mister Genius level," she replied to his smiling come hither, studying the complex multi-dimensional chessboard on the low Japanese table between them in his cabin — she was so damn fetching in that Royal Blue-Black Klingon kimono of his and the deep red vee-neck Fleet issue tee large enough to touch her thighs — and confidently moved up a Knight, cutting off Jim's Rook's value. "I'll go to town on you after I've beaten you a few more times." The phoney innocence of her bearing was replaced by a hint of genuine carnality.

His ship was dead reckoning close to Aldeberan awaiting rendezvous with the deep space survey cruiser USS _Mare Ingenii._ Crewed by midshipmen and cadets before their first assignments, Captain Cregg had sent irritated word they'd be late by half a star day due to shaky warp fields the kids were inexperienced with. While the milk runs and long mapping patrols were driving him mad, as he recovered from broken ribs, a punctured lung and the welts of the Hesh stings, Jim at least could spend private time alone with her. "You're in deep, my friend," Bones had told him, retaping his bandages, "You actually have two "she""s you'll give yourself over to now."

Earlier in Jim's risque variation on her favorite distraction since childhood — he'd literally lost his shirt to her, first match; "Strip three-dimensional chess? Our resident Grand Master who, I remind you, is also your First Officer, wouldn't approve let alone be amused," she had observed. "Aw, the guy's a spoilsport. Check mate. I just won your bra." — he'd mentioned some subspace chatter spreading amongst the Line grade starship Captains to the effect that Section Thirty-One, Starfleet's covert espionage and combat agency in which her father played a key, fateful role leading to his death, had only cloaked itself in the intervening years since the Harrison/Khan nightmare and was, in fact, working its will through the Science Council's development initiative so that the Federation, in spite of its better Angels,had begun embracing an imperative of interstellar "aggressive defense", opposing the Klingons ever-increasing 'sense of Galactic Manifest Destinys. Such chicanery no longer left Carol baffled; a parent's betrayal saw to that.

She'd come to realize that while Alexander Marcus' support and pride in her show-off years was genuine, every solicitation of her scientific gifts, first as a Grad school Cadet and then as an officer, was now tainted, Khan's crew encased in their cryo-tubes proving the only thing he'd never swung past her. To her, Section Thirty-One's machinations were personal, with her dad's sycophantic ally and newly appointed replacement, Admiral Eleanor Parker, repainting his legacy into something less shameful. Carol told Jim that, technically it was all above board, that the Science Council could do whatever it chose with research they had initiated, that they were not liable in any way, even on the floor of the UFP itself. The only proviso, likely, was that to avoid conflict of interest, or at least its appearance, Thirty-One, as a Special Section of Starfleet, would have to employ privatized labs and scientists to take the research to prototype. None of this really surprised her, just disappointed her, as she'd figured it as inevitable when Sitar of Vulcan, head of the Council, had invited her to dinner to sever her team's connections with the senceiver project months before her dad had shut her out of his new torpedo design advancement and coincidentally the day she and her small team of creative bio-techs made their breakthrough with "Ludwig."

"Our discovery, such as it was, was hardly a revelation, just proof it could be a new mass-produced technology for the lowest bidder."

"What was it, the breakthrough?" he asked.

"Oh, you know. Just a speck of dust," she answered with a casual shrug.. "Huh?" Jim managed after no further explanation seemed forthcoming.

The mote of dust was, actually, the smallest working computer circuit ever created. With all the dimension of a wisp of what's-it, it none the less had the output power of Uhura's entire main board. The microchip was encased in a harmless organic liquid and short-hypo'd in the arm, no different than the way they got inoculations as children. Once in the system, a medi-nanite guided the mote that served a practical, non-detectable purpose as a mock-corpuscle, and it nestled and burrowed at the carotid artery by the brain stem and released a sense depressor, like a kind of low yield narcotic, that opened one's self as a receiver from a sender. Kirk had balked; he couldn't get behind that kind of weirdness but Carol assured him that the first trials on one hundred test subjects just before she left the project had scored an unprecedented eighty-three percent positive. Receivers trying to send was a different story; she'd only known that to reach twelve percent on a good day. Doing that took a unique kind of mental discipline.

"Actually," she said, nearly with a a short laugh. "You'd make an ideal fit. In many ways."

"How so?" He slid his other Rook around and behind that Knight, taking one of her many pawns he'd ignored the whole game.

"Just before I walked away, I left some project notes including the best and worst people, well, kinds of people, for inclusion in the next test run. For one thing—" she absently slid her Knight off the Rook and back across Level three— "They needed to be an independent thinker and, my dashing Captain, you're pretty much the most free-spirited man I've ever known let alone become—" Kirk stared at her expectantly, making his features as still as he could — a handsome mask. "Someone I could almost tolerate."

"And for another?" he asked and, as she answered, deliberately elevated his remaining Bishop right in striking range of that Knight.

"You're a free thinker but one who understands discipline, responsibility, the chain of command and you balance those two influences with, well seeming ease." She looked at him. "And a degree of charm." She scooped away his single Bishop with her Knight, never taking her eyes off him…. and couldn't fight the proud-with-herself smile that started forming….

Jim slid his now free Rook across Level Three to where he'd maneuvered her Knight and casually took the piece. Carol went to make her next move but, stopping abruptly, she studied every inch of the tri-boards quickly, expertly.

"What the hell did you just do?"

Now Jim played all innocent. "My dear, beautiful woman, sometimes you overthink yourself. I just put you in check mate. That's all."

She leaned back on her elbows, stared at the chess pieces slowly shaking her head. "You son-of-a-b—"

"Uh, hey," Jim interrupted, holding out his arms, pointing back at himself with his thumbs. "Genius," he reminded.

She blew out a stream of frustration, slipped the kimono from her shoulders and started to pull off the tee shirt. "You want this, I suppose. Well, let me tell you, kiddo, I'm way ahead on points and I'm not leaving til I can hang your bathing togs on the bulkhead behind my bunk.

"Carol, stop. Hold out your hand. Your left hand."

She gave him a curious little look then did as he asked. She was wearing a family heirloom, a light gold wristwatch from the late twenty-first century made to look like it came from an even earlier time, the mid-twentieth. Jim took care undoing the clasp and slipped it from her slim wrist. He finally looked over at her. She was actually almost blushing…...

"She told me when she was briefly there for the live test phase, there were some unexpected positives. Something about a fishing village in Finland?"

Toad shook his head. "I'm not privy to much on Thirty-One's Alpha Level tech. just took the hypo leaders in my Division don't encourage questions. But, yeah. It's actually a town in Norway. Finse. Apparently everyone scores a near perfect positive every time. Men, women, kids."

"What about kids? In general."

"Almost always high scores. Up until puberty, I think. I understand guys like you also adapt well to the tech, and quickly."

"Guys like me? Starship Captains."

"No, those results are uneven. Friend told me they always get tossed. I'm talking high intensity thrill-seekers and athletes. Y'know, your basic rock climbing, deep sea diving, low orbit jumping crazies."

"Hmm. Jokers who can deal with time travel. Return ticket not included. " Jim's lowered tone, his immobile features, his narrow stare brought Toad leaning forward, shaking his head with a self-recriminating grimace, but Jim waved him off.

"Look, I didn't mean to sound like a—" Toad began apologetically for his unwillingness to be more forthcoming.

"Easy, Toad. But there is one thing I'd be grateful for you to explain."

"Of course. If I can. For sure. What is it?"

"I was just curious as to why you spiked my drink with your, uh, your Ludwig. Unless Russian blend vodka of the era distilled in Old Ho Chi Mihn normally tasted like rubbing alcohol strained through Admiral Archer's medicine cabinet . You did just stick a senceiver in me?"

Toad rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and, pulling his hands away, let out a short, quick expulsion of the breath he was holding. "Uh, I could apologize. Or I could deny it, lay some routine on you. But I won't. I was told — directly by Admiral Ellie herself — to make sure you were senceivered. Just for the op."

"Why?"

"You think someone in my position expects an Admiral to explain herself ? Maybe she's hoping whatever you report can be used in whatever political game she's playing. "Y'see, every- -" He broke off- - but barely for half a moment before jumping right in, the brevity of the pause suggesting to Jim the young agent was playing straight up. "Every sensciever comm message gets recorded - - I could explain how if I had an M Two handy and about three hours to spare - - then it's, cataloged and stored in an orbital dyna-matrix at some secret Daystrom facility."

Jim shrugged Toad's anxiety away. "Don't make a difference now, Agent Thirty-One. My time's running out."

"What you gotta understand is everyone below a certain green sheet grade in my Section is a ghost. It's even gone worse since Admiral Marcus. We're all ghosts of ghosts now and I'm barely even that, being green. I'm disposable."

"Must be some grunt to get assigned the highest priority assignment since, well, ever. Maintaining the future of humanity — if Admiral Eleanor's to be believed. A dicey scenario given she's barely told me a damn thing."

"I just do as I'm told. Makes my life easier. Don't get me wrong, I know something about your previous experiences with Section Thirty-One but for what it's worth, me and everyone I work close with are as loyal to the oath as you get. As I know you are. We're fierce Starfleet. Naturals."

"I don't doubt it, Toad. Not for a minute." Despite himself, Jim found himself liking the young espionage agent..

To think, about an hour ago he'd nearly chucked Toad over the side of the ship.

Jim had, in a brief struggle, knocked him from the wing of the derelict and was surprised to see him twist defensively mid-air, landing on his side to protect his head from the hard deck. He immediately sprung to his feet, taking on the classic offense/defense-ready position taught in Starfleet Academy's required Basic Hand-to-Hand. That, the fact he knew Carol's song, and that he'd been finding ways to make Jim's life alone tolerable since he boarded at Pearl provided the only answer to his identity. He approached the j.g., deliberately leaving himself open to attack to see what the kid had going. Toad's swings were by-the-book proficient bu unrelenting and smartly placed. Jim dodged them in a way to frustrate his opponent but Toad maintained an even strain and Jim soon had had enough and delivered a fast, sharp jab to Toad's mid-section, winding him. Jim grabbed hold of Toad, spun him and yanked one of his arms up high between his shoulder blades.

"You're Thirty-One? Section Thirty-One."

"Of course I am. What else could I be?" Toad gasped painfully.

Kirk looked around. The rain was loud enough against the hard top, like a tattoo going mad. He saw a line of boxy maintenance sheds for quick, last minute jet engine repair. He frogmarched Toad across the deck, shoving him into the work room of one of them, releasing him. Toad spun on Jim with no sense of threat just a look of annoyance, frustration, as if he wanted to get a move on.

"I know for a fact, sir, that Admiral Eleanor herself or one of her most trusted associates told you you'd have help waiting for you this side. How else do you get into a Navy on the edge of war. Get assigned to a line Carrier at what certain highly placed officials know is going to be the thick of it? How do you get assigned to an A squadron as a fighter pilot so fast and without question?"

Jim thought on it— Toad's point was pure crystal and inarguable. From the protective metal walls, the rain dancing across the roof sounded like bacon popping as it crisped on the stove Sunday morning. He flashed on the occasional and irregular week-end brunch aboard the Enterprise with Nyota and Bones wrestling control from the ship's dietitian and Mess Officer, Lieutenant Choy, then trying to out do each others' old family favorites. Family... _"My crew is my family,_ _Kirk. Is there anything you would not do for your family...?"_

"Uh, look, someone could walk in on us," Toad impressed on Jim.

Kirk frowned and with a frustrated sigh ordered, "My quarters."

Toad nodded and immediately led them out the shed.

In Kirk's cabin, Toad could answer few of Jim's questions, not from secrecy, as one might expect of an espionage trained Starfleet agent assigned Section Thirty-One but because he was essentially an analyst better with stats than political troubles troubles though he'd shown skill in role playing on field jobs. Like most of Starfleet, he knew almost nothing of whatever really had knocked Jim down - - and didn't ask - - but his obvious admiration of the man made him not even consider it within the realm of possibility. But then here he was aboard an American warship on the eve of an official outbreak of a useless war that was. none the less, a vital historical event, with that same remarkable young Officer who essentially had a death sentence hanging 'round his neck. Toad, was there to facilitate Jim's next step on a mission that Toad knew would likely kill him.

Jim knew he'd impressed the kid by reputation alone but had earned his respect as well by taking him seriously with questions Toad could answer about the next step demanded by the mission. "So our rendezvous, that'lll be my staging area for the target?"

"The sub's the Nautalis. She's period convincing though I'm told she's got a few unique special features. Our new allies are running things from there for the Admiral—"

"I met them when I last reconned with Parker in Texas."

Toad nodded, studying Kirk, seeing the weariness. "Get some rest, sir. You'll need to be on top of things. I can use the time to double-check ship's status and figure out Nautalis' likely approach vect—'

Jim had gone and stretched out on his cot.

"I'll be back in about twenty minutes...

Later, his suspicions regarding Toad's orders vis-a-vis the senceiver and his plans for facilitating his disembarking the Ticonderoga for this sub, the Nautalis, settled to his temporary satisfaction, Jim sorted to the few belongs he'd brought aboard ship, discarding most, wrapping the others in pages from a Navy newspaper and stuffing them in his small canvass carry bag.

"Toad, let me ask you something-"

"How does a punk like me draw this one?" Toad asked in response to Jim's query before he could ask it.

"Yeah."

"Partly because, after two years of carefully chosen assignments, outta the office, I proved a pretty good deep cover."

Kirk pointed at him, casually. "That's why you didn't just come up to me and say, 'Hi, I'm from the future just like you," when I came aboard?"

"Had to get a sense of who you are— beyond the growing legend. Mainly though, I was chosen specially because I think in numbers. English is just the language I have no choice using. I know time travel equations like commuters know the shuttle schedule out of Tycho. I guess it's… well, numbers never disappoint you. They are just what they seem to be."

That hung there a moment, against the low rumble of the Ticonderoga herself, a sound not entirely dissimilar to the thrum the systems on his ship made at sub light glide. And the eternal moaning of the sea, like the lonely cries of all it had swallowed. Toad jumped to his feet.

"Damn, we"re down to twenty-five minutes. And knowing her skipper, they're running ahead of schedule. You…" Toad paused, struggled lightly with possibilities… "Get yourself in the place you gotta be while I check who's working the bridge and I'll run through our course one more time—that reminds me…." He dug a folded paper from his back pocket, handing it to Kirk who opened it to find a crudely outlined shape of the carrier,with a few details, bulkheads drawn in, a winding line of red. "I've seen you walking the ship, figured you were memorizing the lay out. Study this. It's how I'm going to get you where you can hit the water best for the Nautilis. Then destroy it. Burn it, tear it up and flush it. Just—"

Kirk was already studying the blueprint, ordering distractedly., "Get a move on, Lieutenant."

Toad hesitated as if to speak, turned and started for the door.

"Toad," Kirk said, bringing the Thirty-One agent to a stop. "You said you pulled this detail mainly for your math and science…?" He could see the the conflict over his response jumping around in eyes magnified some by the old fashioned spectacles growing popular again in their century

"When I found out who they were sending on this… terrible mission. Like I said, I didn't believe for a second what they were accusing you of. Not the way they said it happened anyway.'

Kirk started to respond but let it go.

"The idea of sacrificing, hell, maybe their best officer — certainly the best Captain of the main line — makes no sense to me, tactical or otherwise. And though I'll regret having to be one of the instruments of your sacrifice, it's a great honor to have worked with you, Sir. Captain Kirk."

"Thanks, Lieutenant," Kirk replied simply and jerked a thumb toward the door. Toad's body language noticeably relaxed leaving Jim aware the young officer had likely wanted to get that off his chest since greeting him while doing a quick fix of his Crusader's shorted lightboard after his first flight out.

"Right," Toad muttered, fumbling his way out of the cabin. He stopped and turned back to the living legend, the casual banter of their's as they befriended one another an ingratiation. It was a look Kirk recognized from everyone, it had seemed, since his defeat of Khan sent him though the other side and back again, saving the Earth from a powerful mad man and, perhaps war with a hostile empire as he defied what couldn't be defied. Speaking in an almost tremulous whisper that unnerved Jim, Toad said, "Captain, if its ever discovered what I'm about to tell you, I'm blackballed from Thirty-One."

"Toad?'

"One of the hot dogs on the Nautilus, Parker's agents or the Captain - - he's one of us - - will explain the workings of your senceiver— but basically it's like talking to yourself without speaking. You run the receiver's code you've been given through your head 'til you hear a tone, like a dog and a high-pitched— uh, hell. Here." Toad pulled out another folded slip of paper, this one with hand scribbled five digit codes that Jim read over several times. "What they won't tell you about it is highly classified. Understand?"

Jim nodded .

Toad's vocal stresses had become tentative, yet a warning as well. "The code at the bottom there?" He reached past the Captain, laid a finger on a set of numbers but this one was followed by a short string of letters. "Run this one through your head and it will actually record onto the Ludwig inside of mine and be sent to that matrix at Daystom on Alfa Caranae Two."

"A fail safe."

"Presuming, as we must that you're not returning home, I can download the message — readable only highest-rated — and dispatch it privately to…" He hesitated. "Whomever you want it sent to"

"Whomever I want," Jim repeated slowly, in a way that suggested his suspicions.

"I can't promise anything. Except to say…. there's a pretty good chance it'll work. In which case you can tell…. her… whatever you have to."

"Toad, thanks but—" Jim shook his head. Sort of.

"Captain, remember, we likely got one shot at this. Time's nearly up and once we get 'er in gear, things could turn hairy fast." He saw Jim frown as if a little taken aback.

"American military slang of the era." Kirk tiredly shook his head. He clearly understood Toad's meaning. All that military history he'd read for years and all those ancient pre-holo' movies she'd had him watching.

"Thanks, Lieutenant," Jim said and Toad could hear both the gratitude and, clearly, the rejection.

Toad nodded his understanding and said off handed as he left, I'll be back pretty damn soon. Have your gear ready in your pack. As he closed the door behind him, he casually made something more than a suggestion. "Pack your service weapon but I want you to have the cop's revolver I gave you handy."

Kirk was about to object but Toad closed the door and was gone. Kirk drew the thirty-eight from his waistband and tossed the pistol by his gray-blue shoulder bag on the foot of his cot. He gave the blueprint a once over, nothing more. He'd been aboard and poking around long enough to have committed the aircraft carrier's lay-out to almost instant recall. The codes with the sender/receiver's initials, he couldn't trust to memory so he tore them off and stuck them in a pocket. Only he and Toad would understand them. He took the blueprint and drew his Navy zippo with the Ticonderoga's logo engraved on it,, lighting it up. He dropped the burning paper in the basin and, staring a moment more, doused it. He screwed up the remains in an unreadable wet ball and dropped them in the plastic waste paper basket by the useless, tiny table meant to pass as a writing desk. He looked up and saw himself reflected back in the porthole, a dead-eyed golem who just looked like Jim Kirk.

"Where are you?" he thought. "Your time to show's nearly gone." It had been short timing him, cheating him, since the night he'd swung Pasha Klimt's razor sword in a blur at the thuggish Orion leader himself and knew immediately there'd be hell to pay."Godamnit", he cried out in his head. "This is the only time I've ever expected anything from you, and I want you here now. Son of a bitch, I need you."

He was calling angrily„ almost helplessly„ on the magic.

Of course, he didn't use that word specifically and it never would of occurred to him to actually say it aloud. In fact, it never would have occurred to him — whatever it was — to really think about it all. just like those test jet pilots and early astronauts from three centuries before him that he so enjoyed reading about in that vintage antique hardcover book, and how they didn't literally think of having "the right stuff." All Jim knew for sure was the worse things got, the faster he could yank the rabbit from the proverbial hat.

The Magic, like "the right stuff," wasn't just simple, understandable bravery, though such bravery was the easiest way to describe it. Experience stirred it up and drove it and he'd gone farther faster than any other human being. Ever. To the extent he'd voyaged right through the shadowy undiscovered country and came back again even stronger.. There were the crazy desires of boyhood swallowing the sprawl and throb of the entire untamed Earth, the red-hot smarts of those roller coaster years and the smartassery as well. The Magic was the magic courtesy of anyone who knew failure well. But most of all, The Magic was precisely Unknowable . Ineffable, Not the Magic of sawing some some woman in half or smashing a stranger's time piece into unusable, irreparable detritus. It wasn't that kind of showmanship. It was the Magic that compelled people, general strangers of all ages, to follow him beyond the farthest star and do just about anything, no matter the danger or the hopelessness — men, women or aliens with only the barest skeletal understanding of human nature.

But the Magic, if that's what you chose to cal it, had vanished without making a sound. I ,just wasn't godamn there any longer. He could blame someone else for it - - Klimt and his sickly, bloated sense of pleasure and power, Admiral Ellie's manipulations that had made him give his best to her, Spock and his logic, Carol and her... Carol - - Kirk's hand balled into a tight fist, flew up and cracked the small port window. He left a diagonal crack down his reflection. Then his heart beat heavy and very fast, nearly shaking his whole body.

A heavy _thud_ he ought to have heard but for the damage to the port was actually a scuffle— the heady slap of flesh on flesh— the hard, dull impact of bodies against his door then the mad clatter as the bodies rolled along the bulkhead in the corridor outside his quarters. One seemed to carry his weight like an unrelenting beast, a Klingon war hog; the other thrashed as if manic energy alone would overwhelm his animal-enemy. As Jim rushed the door, he brushed past the small, weighty night stand in an explosion of glass as he sent flying a pitcher of water. Another panicky cry cut through through, similar to the first, both jabbering in a cruel guttural militarism, a jarring stop-start cadence, too much a quick babble to get a bead on but he realized they weren't speaking anything he re knew. The third voice was clearly Basic, American English, familiar not from just the language alone but from its normally indolent So Cal drawl. But it was now alive with a palpable, desperate panic.

Toad was naerly screaming.

"No, Jim! No, don't- - They're- -!" He was cut off by what Kirk knew was a hard slap across the face and a blow to his gut knocking the air from him, forcing a short, deep moan.

As he had only started to open the door, Toad fell back through it, his attacker landing on top of him. He was Tiiconderoga Military Police wearing wide steel bars on his collar, marked CV-14 - 1964. He was large, all muscle, his monstrous hands virtual vices with meaty fingers tight around Toad's throat. "Jim!—," he gasped, "Go!" — as he tried squirming free. Kirk, though, was already on them, fists locked together to cub the patrolman, when a second M.P. rushed him, charging in from his look-out position a little down the corridor from Kirk's cabin. Rangier than his chief, he grabbed the Captain, spinning him around and shoving Kirk back. The Navy man took up a classic attack, throwing roundhouses then skilled kicks in the tight space. Kirk took a few, looking for weakness. He then ducked, dodged and balanced himself firmly with a widely spaced stance and delivered a flurry of punches to the officer's face,. The last blow staggered the second M.P. back. Jim had seen that his attacker fought two dimensionally and didn't see Kirk slip the twist of a foot behind one of his own and pitching sideways, smashing his forehead against the sharp rim of the solid steel wash basin. A loud, sharp crack sounded and quickly dulled- -

"Toad—!" Jim started, turning to help young Thirty-One agent but he froze at what he saw and fell silent. Toad, armed with the heavy revolver from the foot of Kirk's cot, whipped up the gun just as the Navy military officer pushed himself erect and managed a couple of steps toward the Kid. Toad squeezed off two, seemingly without even aiming. The first shot hit the policeman's left shoulder, spinning him back. Barely a moment later, the man steadied himself and Toad fired a through-and-through. The Navy Man's face twisted a little in confusion, he managed almost one step forward and fell on his face.

Toad was immediately on a knee, searching the attacker's body, his uniform. "My god, Toad," Jim finally uttered, wrapping his head around the killing. "What have you done?" Toad grabbed Jim's small canvas kit and stuck in his finds: several I.D.s, an exotic switch in a custom-made fastener strapped around a leg above the ankle.. Jim assumed its exoticism period Vietnamese or older and Toad jerked free the M.P's forty-five regular from his holster. As he added the items to the bag, he gave the Captain a revised update that Jim didn't really hear, shaking his head.

"I received word from the Nautilis. It's been shadowed by the Lafayette, nuclear sub - - American, and just under ten minutes ago, their skipper changed course on a no-nonsense Go for us. Time for you to skip this birdfarm." Toad noticed something behind Jim and shoved the canvas bag into Kirk's grasp as his awareness cleared, crystalized, but he could do nothing; it all happened incredibly fast. Jim's attacking Patrolman had hauled himself from the steel basin, all shakes.

"Excuse me, sir," Toad mumbled with purpose. He slipped by Jim and in a single, unbroken motion, came up close to the M.P., who pulled his head from the basin only to have the small young man in thick glasses jerk his head back further and shove Kirk's thirty-eight into the man's mouth, taking a single shot. Jim jumped a little on the spot. Unlike how it happened in the old holo' movies she so adored, this gunshot report made no explosive boom. It was a short and small, flat crack that lasted just a heartbeat.

Toad headed for the door, ordering Jim, "C'mon, sir. We're down to minutes." When he saw the Captain was staring at him, then the body of the M.P. Toad had shot first, he bent by the first M.P. he'd shot dead and tore open the man's outer uniform shirt, sending buttons flying.

"Kid," Jim said sharply. These two may just be anonymous soldiers to us, but the impact of what you just did-"

"What? The timeline?" Toad jumped ahead in Jim's thinking. "Consider it unaffected in this case." He then ripped the undershirt. The man's face, throat and upper body down to his chest were Caucasian, his mid-section mottled shit brown and 'round his hips, splotches Jim felt he should recognize. Toad was tugging the body's trousers and further down still, his skin tone was jade down along both pair of legs and his privates. Deep, deep green... Toad came up close to Jim, uttering, "Captain Kirk. Time to go."


	11. Chapter 11 Nautilus part I

**Nautilus** ( _I_ )

Jim hadn't gone swimming in the Indian Ocean in years— well, ten by his reckoning, nearing the end of his first year at Starfleet Academy. He hadn't been given leave; an Academy Cadet didn't get leave time even after a year like his freshman's — they gave him, instead, an extended layover between his advanced medical and CAT scan in Kyoto, necessary for the new classes he'd been accepted for, and reporting for Corps Group on Djerba in Tunisia. Before the end of his first semester, he'd begun to make a name for himself separate from his dad's legend; he was knocking Captain Pike's expectations off the rails and even giving himself a laugh kicking his own bravado's ass. He'd excelled in his least favorite work, computer research, several of the lab-based sciences, but it had been more than enough to get thrown into the Command school stream. "When they give me the center seat on an Akula or the refit Constitution class, just make sure my exec's a Vulcan or a Betazed, someone good at pushing buttons," he'd joke dismissively in the illegal makeshift officer's club. "That's all the use I'll have for 'em." For Kirk it was going to be a captaincy or nothing.

He asked for Starfleet S-SEALs for Command grades, not for the training traditions so much as the experiences in both planetary and space strategy and combat. Thinking and fighting. The brain and the phaser. Hell, by the time he was free styling low orbital jumps over Djerba to Olafsvik, he'd broken more than a few S-SEAL records completing the program in his Sophomore term, after less than a year and there was already talk amongst starship-assigned officers who served as teaching assistants in practical classroom training — Finney, Garrovick, Bob Wesley — that Kirk was a real "clap rail", a rare bird who may well, like Alexander Marcus and Bob April, be promoted junior grade while still a cadet and have, on his graduation day, a deep space assignment already lined up, likely as the XO on one of the Big Twelve. "We'll all be taking orders from Admiral James T. Kirk," Wesley joked as they drank in the actual officer's bar, Bowman's, in slow tumble geo sync on the way up to Clavius. Jim offered a profane response regarding Bob's preferences among female cadets to laughs but didn't say a word about all he wanted being the center seat and more than his father's twelve minutes. He figured the Universe owed him at least for those twelve and what it didn't give, he'd take. He could save everyone now as he swam the depths, doing what Admiral Parker convinced him only he could do. He could save Carol... he would save his love….

Was this rapture of the deep he was experiencing? Not in the medical sense — nitrogen narcosis; he'd made enough pressurized EVAs in space and deep sea dives, and that mind-numbing plunge into the thick sentient molasses that comprised U-Bas-Ni-Da, to recognize the shakes, the slurs, the purple-blue in the base of the fingernails… the angry confusion — this wasn't that. It was the reverie, the disappearance of any dividing line between the stars and the sea, heavens and earth, time and space… Kirk reached out and pulled the steel pins from the weights on his lower arms, rolling up knees to chest and dropping them from his ankles. As the weights drifted away, Jim bobbed up in the water and rolled onto his back— and the rapture of the deep was gone. Above him, on the surface, was the harsh reality of the Ticonderoga, its silhouette stark against white emergency lights as it listed portside and small explosions continued rippling. The dark hulls of the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy angled toward it. Kirk rolled back over, pulling himself forward with the strength of his arms and frog-kicks. He glanced at the plastic watch stitched into the rubber wrist cuff of the diving suit. It was synced to his air tank and showed he had just about five minutes of air, about half of his start, remaining — maybe more as his survival training made him capable of slowing his breath and making it shallow. That didn't alter the fact that unless the Nautilus arrived, and soon, he'd likely drown to death in the middle of the vast Indian Ocean in August of nineteen sixty-four. He could try to smuggle himself back aboard one of the American destroyers— but the troubles up there were making that not only difficult, almost impossible; he also felt the need to stay away from it all as much as possible. He'd helped twist the universe and the fabric of reality enough for one day.

Kirk's Academy grad class, the one on paper anyway, the one he arrived with, matriculating '58, was the first to study time travel as a practical going concern, akin to the Prime Directive, First Contact protocols and the limits of alien negotiations and the options of combat. Until then, temporals were the the stuff of numbers, equations and likelihoods, complexities that engaged the minds of a Mister Spock or a Carol Marcus but that simply gave Jim a sharp pain between his eyes and that stabbed his temples. Traveling through time in practice, as Captain Archer had discovered, revealed in papers Jim had once been shown, and Chis Pike, too, on his first command, aboard the USS Oza Butte, witnessing the birth of Sol, involved paradoxes wrapped in larger paradoxes and he'd made it another boast about his likely Captaincy: no time travel. What was done was done and he was a young man of the here and now, moving shark-like forward.

Only there was now an American aircraft carrier burning above him on the surface of an Asian sea three hundred years before he was born and he was partly to blame. Not that Jim blamed himself or anything he had done; it was simply his presence that had set a number crunching twenty-four year old special agent from his time, the far future, on his way to making a deadly bad decision that had turned the non-existent Gulf of Tonkin Incident into something tangible— unless this was one a those pre-determinations he remembered from the Academy; that he was meant to do this and had always done it— ? Aw, forget it; he'd only got a passing grade in"Time and Space One-oh-One because he'd guessed right more often than wrong...

And there it was. Emerging from the swirling murk kicked up by the damages to the Ticonderoga, it was the Nautilus. Jim checked the watch and saw he had about two minutes to spare, almost three. Poor, young Toad had cut her fine and short. The submersible was larger than he expected — as long as half a city block you'd find in D.C. or New Berlin. Heavy up at the rounded bow, tapering to its stern lost in the dense waters. Fins along the sides and scattered bumps were likely sensor pods, perhaps even of future origin and could gain attention, Kirk thought. She was running without power, no lights and a still engine but that's what Jim would have done considering a nuclear sub, the American LaFayette, was on the prowl.

In fact, he had essentially done the same thing just weeks before the ill-fated Captain's Summit, ordering Scotty to cut power and guiding Sulu on a glide path through an asteroid field studded with debris from a centuries old forgotten war. A pack of Orion automated stalker-killers were hunting them after they'd reconned a shipyard edging into Federation space. "You've got a set on you, kiddo," she'd said after he'd asked her politely to turn her guns on them the moment Sulu glanced back at him with a grin and a nod once they were clear.

The question was, even with its sensitive fins and sensor pods, how was he to attract the Nautilus' attention with the rain storm and the falling pieces of burning circuitry panels hitting the water off the carrier and turning the Gulf into a sea of strange steam. Jim worked up the nerve and gave the senceiver its due. He concentrated, said softly, "James Kirk to Nautilus. I'm forward of your bow awaiting pre-arranged pick up. Nautilus?" He repeated the message, his breath growing short as his air supply thinned. And he got nothing in reply.

Kirk gathered his strength and swam the distance to the boat that grew closer. He studied the surface for metallurgical indications of a possible entry; seams, rivets, a sealed hatch if he was lucky. He ran a hand up along its hull side, considering just plain knocking, when he jerked his hand from the surface and kicked, pulling himself back and away. Even through the thick rubber and metal mesh of his scuba suit's gloves, he could tell the difference between man-made manufacture and something organic, something alive.

Kirk had never seen an earth-native whale, the last remaining of the only species left having gone extinct several years before his birth. Attempts to clone the sophisticated creatures were flawed, short-lived. The whale before him rolled open yellow-black eyes twice the size of billiard balls, nested in rows and wrinkles of blubber and it slowly yawned its wide maw, revealing not the sharp teeth of legend but rows of soft, lightly hairy tissue called baleen. It drew in massive amounts of microscopic fish and shrimp and swirling vegetation like kale and kelp that Jim had been barely aware he was swimming though.

The whale paid Kirk no attention as he made his way up its great curved side and, taking hold of one of those dorsal lumps, pulling himself up and over. Treading water, Kirk was surprised to find an identical leviathan hanging close by. The second whale was taking up an unusual position, lowering its massive head and stretching its heavy shape upwards. It held its position with slow, steady waves of its thick, long flippers. It was making sounds. They were repetitive high squeals, each followed by a rumbling basso expulsion. Almost immediately, Jim had reason to believe the sounds were a summoning.

They appeared through the drifting, sinking graveyard of mechanical chunks of Crusader fighters and once nimble helicopters, Hueys, two more whales… then a third…. no, a fourth. They were of the same species, it seemed to Jim, but different sizes, different ages he suspected. A pod, that's what a group like this was called, possibly all of the family.

The whale farthest from him, on the edge of the pod, began to glow. The strangeness of it grabbed hold of Jim and for the barest of moments, he imagined it some magical creature from the depths — but he could tell almost immediately that the light actually originated just behind the marine animal, silhouetting it. The light produced a flare effect, alternating red to blue — and there was a pattern to it, a pattern Jim easily recognized. It was Federation Basic Visual, Code Three, that simply identified a spacecraft by name and occasionally registry, destination and purpose. This message was kept bare bones. Kirk quietly recited as he read, "Submersible Nautilus. Nautilus on rendezvous. Signal rendezvous." It repeated.

Kirk didn't think about it. He didn't concentrate particularly more than he would in any other difficult, challenging circumstances. He just spoke in a calm and quiet voice. "Nautilus, this is Kirk. I'm bow, portside. I—"

That's all he got out— "We see you, Mister Kirk." The voice was in his ear, so clear, so close, it was like his conscience out of a fable. He'd heard the next generation standard comm at a Sato School presentation and it made the current technology sound like an ancient compact disc player. This senceiver that Carol had played a part in developing defied effective description. "You've got just enough oxygen in your body and your gear. We're bringing you in by soft beam."

Before Kirk could reply, he was tugged forward, drawn along beyond his control. Even a ship as large and powerful as his Enterprise left a crew, after experiencing a tractor beam, with slight shakes. The soft beam, however, was like a caress. It was used at disaster scenes and the evac of the most severe Starfleet combat wounded, not unlike these Hueys that had intrigued Kirk since arriving "in country." It didn't give you the shakes; at worst it provided bed spins, like knocking back a half dozen "instant drunks" such as Romulan ale and having a friend help you home with a warm arm around your shoulders.

Then the pod broke up and with surprising urgency, moving their bulk more quickly than Kirk would have expected and he knew they sensed something beyond him. This was their environment. A massive jagged piece of the retrieval crane from the Ticonderoga's conning tower hit the water nearby hard, bubbling and steaming, the metal popping, as it twisted and sunk. It was used to pull aboard salvageable wreckage from fighters whose jocks had screwed the pooch and hit the water on a screwy landing, misjudging the slab of tar the dimensions of a football field heaving up, down and sideways. Even torn to shreds by an explosion aboard the Ticonderoga, it was so heavy it would have chopped even a whale in half.

Jim intuitively balled into a fetal shape in useless defense, finally banging into the curved hull of the Nautilus. Less than a stretched arm away a hatched rolled open and Jim saw and felt hands in heavy rubber scuba gloves reach out. They took strong hold of him and drew him into the inky dark of the sub's air space. Kirk looked back and saw past the carrier's burnt up detritus one of the whales. They were all swimming onward through waters that had served as a staging area for centuries of passing, petty human conflict. The leviathan Kirk could see most clearly was propelled by great movements of thick tail fins, its flukes, that seemed to waving farewell to the stranger from outer space.


	12. N a u t i l i s part I I

**Two-Oh-One and Maria Twelve**

Kirk sat deathly still, studying the details, an unusual array of technology, that comprised the tight-walled wardroom. An old, threadbare brown cotton blanket hanging from his shoulders, he'd also been given fresh, dry clothes, plain and simple sailor's work clothes, and a large cup of black coffee. He sipped the stuff casually — it tasted like lukewarm syrup — making it seem like an apparent time traveling suicide mission was part of the job description. He assumed his make-believe indifference was convincing enough ; the mysterious middle-aged man, fit and slim, silver haired, in a sharp-lined period business suit at odds with his heavy weather-proof orange jacket, standing across the ward room showed him little interest. Kirk had met the fella once before though he couldn't say when exactly, time losing its certainty— no, that afternoon conference in Eleanor's streamliner. Near Corpus. That afternoon of the night he'd fought with Carol and she'd said aloud, meaningfully at last, that she was in love with him. The night he'd left her, left for her.

The mystery man, accompanied by an intriguing woman in her early fifties who insisted Jim call her by name — strangely, Maria Twelve — was referred to with some respect even by the Admiral and her team as Agent Two-Oh-One. The kindest thing he had said to Jim at that meeting was a flat, "We know just who you are." "You have much to live up to," added the woman in a soft not-quite French accent ; Maria Twelve, whom the silver haired Two-Oh-One referred to as Agent Three-Four-Seven, their "Agency" going unnamed, had said it with a clear trace of humor that had made Two-Oh-One frown. The eternal, ever-active gambler, he noted to himself, if it came to picking sides or soliciting an ally, he could work her to work for him. After all, he was Jim Kirk….

Jim Kirk - - as early a a very young teen — would always insist, to the point of hostility, on an unrelenting certainty that He Was Right and anyone who disagreed was, at best, in need of schooling. When he was twelve he'd curse out cops for treating him like a child and it still bothered him, Christopher Pike's single instance of real indignation, the older man certain that with his actions on Niburu, Jim was wasting unusually powerful command potential, squandering it because he was actually proud about taking self-importance for the stuff of Legend.

With age, however, came experience and experience, well measured, brought an easy, appealing and enduring authority. It was an authority that, at its strongest, generally shorn of obsessive self-regard in deference to his crew's admiration, largely comprised Spock's unparalleled professional loyalty and his unlikely emotional relationship with James Kirk, his friend. To Carol, the embrace of all of that blilowy heroism, no matter its misleading ease, allowed her alone to endlessly tease him, the one in a million amongst ordinary men who could orchestrate then order his crew on a skillful bluff to immolate a Klingonii combat fleet on a bloody Quel'mAcht, or "war path", when their forces dared to target his limping, battle-torn ship and be just as at ease, hours later in private, his gamlbe won, crisis averted, making a light-hearted but sensual and deeply arousing game of, as Admiral Eleanor later joked, Carol "putting him in his place." In fact, that aspect of him, that confidence in himself, made her ache; he remembered her telling him that plainly and proving it one of their first nights spent in his cabin.

Jim had once told a complement of his new officers, including Carol Marcus, getting to know them early into their five years over Quartermaster's beer, the story of how then Captain Pike "conned" him into enlisting in Starfleet, playing up his "bet" that he'd graduate in just three years. He told only Carol, though, and almost a year later, about demotion and having his command of Enterprise taken after Niburu - - a "tarnish" the admiralty kept off the public record in light of subsequent events - - and the significant something Pike taught him then in harsh words. He'd normally share this recurring memory and his resulting concerns with Bones who was more than just his doctor; "you're a hell of a bartender," he often told McCoy who got his shorthand. He could even bend Spock's ear, as it were, though discussing something of complex emotions would mean spending half his time explaining personal basics and winding up expunging his own grief. No doubt Spock considered it intentional on his part; "Socratic," even. But for reasons he didn't fully understand then, and he usually went out of his way never to appear "weak" before a woman to whom he was attracted, he wanted to tell Carol…..

Enterprise had been drydocked for repairs at Starbase Twenty-Two, badly damaged, barely making it through a monstrous ion storm. He'd told her that he wanted her to stay with him planetside for the duration in the V.I.P. quarters he'd be given and she'd enthusiastically agreed even knowing they'd likely draw attention and even professional disapproval, outright disdain for their openness. He'd smiled at her worries, not broadly just a little, and the for the first time she joined him in his proclamation of his self-assuredness: "I'm Jim Kirk." They spent the evening amused by old stories with Spock and Uhura, Bones and Scotty, laughs new to Carol, avoiding the officer's dining hall in favor of a quiet private restaurant where McCoy maintained a friendly relationship with the Denobulan manager. But as the evening wore on, the wine flowing freely, Carol's laughter subsided; she'd become aware of Jim's silence, a moody silence she'd seen him fall to only once or twice before.

Late that night, in bed, stroking his hard chest, she'd asked him what had bothered him since their meal. He knew she had quickly, in a way few did or that he allowed, come to read his small silences as uncertain admissions of guilt, envy, despair. So much at ease around this woman, he grew serious and confessed to her that much of what Christopher Pike and he had argued about regarding his first run at Captaincy, still left him feeling less the humility his mentor expected of him, despite the good humored, very deep and real respect their friends had for him, even informally over dinner, and more of a secret failure. Not always and barely often at all, but for a starship Captain, one of his repute, barely often at all was too much too often. He was still fighting for "the greatness" Pike claimed he saw in him; but he stressed the fact that Pike had been killed, had died essentially in Kirk's arms, his chosen Number One and also the savagery of the beating he'd laid on the man he held most responsible for his commander's assassination, an assault that would've killed, vengefully, thrillingly, an ordinary, normal unarmed man, and even his self-sacrifice, giving his life to save his ship, his crew, the people of Frisco, which he felt was borne, more from desperation than bravery, heroism…. greatness.

Carol listened closely, nodding as she idly soothed his unease with a forefinger along the side of his neck, his shoulder. And then she interrupted him. "Jim," she said quietly but in a way that demanded his attention, "three weeks ago, Enterprise time, you personally outsmarted a dangerously transformed early Earth space probe bent on the genocide of all life that didn't match its limited idea of perfection." Before Jim could utter a sound— "Shortly before that you defeated — defeated — an age old alien being that had convinced our ancient Greek ancestors it was a god and they created a mythology for him that still holds sway over imaginations. Jim, your strength of will brought down Apollo."

"Carol," he said, looking down and away, his tone low, serious, his voice almost a rumble just familiar enough to upset her coming from a man so certain of himself, at ease and kind. Then he looked up at her, smiling the Jim Kirk smile. "Sounds like you're one lucky lady—" Her right hand came up, her fingers pressing down on his full lips, the other hand, stroking and playing with his hair, pulling his head back.

"No, Jim. Not the charm. Not now. It's driving me crazy and not in the way you know I normally love. You're taking us seriously, personally, so see it through. Now." She tightened her fingers in his hair, trying to draw him out through some overcooked authority she knew he responded to in a funny way only from her.

"You assuming command?" She recognized his responsive playfulness as a slight intentional distraction and would only let him take it so far.

"You'll find I'm quite the taskmistress," she gave back at him. He drew her closer, moving his hand behind her head to draw her into a deep kiss. She turned away. "For starters, you do what I say. Sir."

Jim understood he'd opened the door. And that he really did want her to lead him through. He stroked her hair.

"Next week it'll be two years."

"I know," she said softly but with the barest touch of anger. Then she understood— "You're still— You can't let it go, what he said about you not respecting the Chair."

"It took me a while to get it, or admit it, but he wasn't just talking about the center seat."

"Jim," Carol sighed with some exasperation. "Chris practically thought of you as his son from what I understand."

"Well, even surrogate sons can disappoint make believe fathers."

"He fought for you — hard — to be assigned his Exec. You do understand what that meant? Where he wanted that to lead?"

"Of course I do," Jim spat. "But…"

"But what? Tell me, Jim. No argument."

"I'll sound like a child if I say it aloud. Or a self-involved, desperate fool."

Jim felt she had something about her, something special, whether she actually did or not. She knew that. He listened to her. That meant she was in a very small, select handful of people. He didn't necessarily agree with her or do as she told him, not always, but it meant both of them were opening parts of the mselves to the other they never had with anyone else. This included, for him, something as small as recognizing her determination in the cool flash in those eyes… made cooler still by the slightest hint of weak-at-the-knees amusement at a corner of her mouth that told him she was sure about him, his strengths and weaknesses.

"My dear," she said, "if you never spoke when you sounded childish or foolish, our conversations would be rather one sided."

Jim pulled a face of mock disbelief and Carol responded taking control by slipping her right leg over his hips, pulling herself up straddling him. Their light, airy blanket slipped down around her waist. She held him down, her hands pressing on his shoulders, fingers spread.

His eyes flickered almost imperceptibly and then he stared hard ahead. At her. She cocked her head expectantly, waiting, and he marvelled deep inside again at how keenly she could read him, his practiced controlled dance of expressions, and faster than he thought possible.

"You're probably right about why Pike argued for me to be his First. He knew I'd earn the Enterprise again — likely on his terms," he said.

She couldn't help the warm suggestion of a smile, a new and fully caring and taken, lover's smile. He continued, just a little rufeully, "I just wish I could have told him about out-thinking Nomad myself and asserting the human spirit over a would- be god."

"Chris would have been proud of you, not just for your accomplishments but for being true to yourself. And probably secretly proud of himself that he was so right about you." She paused and then just said it flatly, simply, in a way that told him she had actually begun to fall deeply for him; "Your dad, the Captain, he'd have been proud, too." And she knew fathers, Kirk thought darkly, and this second bleak anniversary was likely even harder on her though she didn't show it. He kissed her and this time she didn't resist but something had occurred to her and she pulled her head back, angling his mouth to her throat so she could speak… "Though, I think you'd have had a harder time winning Chris over when you report the outcome of our recent jaunty negotiations with the—" she decided upon a word "—leaders of Sigma Iotia."

Kirk's mouth twisted as he worked a comeback. "I think what I came up with was entirely reasonable."

"Well, let's think that through," she said, sliding off him and rolling onto her stomach, her posture part hint, part summons. He began rubbing her shoulders, lightly digging the flats of his palms down her back. "You're a helluva Captain, Mister Kirk, but you have a real future ahead of you as a lady's masseur," she'd said on what they still teen-fully called their "first date." She told him point blank, knowing Admirals as she did, they'd be "affronted," on the record, by the deal he'd struck with the Earth-poisoned culture of Iotia II's nineteen twenties, kill-or-be-killed gangland Chicago. "But they'll find a use for the Federation's so-called "cut" of the Iotians' GNP. So, we go back in a year and see if they've evolved from "putting the bag" on their sworn enemies, you, your hired merciless killer, Spock-o, your hatchet man, "Saw Bones." your money in the bank card sharp whiz kid with the funny accent, what'd you call Pavel, "Fizzbin?" And," she concluded with an ugh, rolling her eyes, then fixing him with a dirty look, "let's not forget Hailey Comet, your favorite brainless but leggy gun moll and exotic, erotic dancer extrordinaire."

"At least you were convincing."

Carol slapped him harmlessly. "Maybe Chris had a point after all, taking away that ship of yours."

"The thing about "greatness" where Pike and I differed had less to do with feats of bravery or standing by a tough decision. See, Iotia proved— uh, Carol?

She looked over at him, hoping he wouldn't stop with his hands. He'd cut himself off and she heard something quizzical in his voice.

"You referring to the late Admiral as "Chris"? You've done it half a dozen times. I didn't think you knew him. Not that well."

"Sure you did. I told you." When she looked away, really just a flick of her eyes, it was almost imperceptible. But Jim Kirk was an even better poker player than he was at strip three-dee chess, and that barest of flickers was as much a "tell" as Spock scratching his temple or now the warmth of embarrassment seeping red to her cheeks. "My dad, remember, mentored him from deckhand ofn the Alpha Centauri passenger line through to his first command?"

"But still, Carol, "Chris"? Really?"

She knew he was playing with her but he still was groping. That gave her some advantage… "He became friends with my family. He had none of his own. Not really. Jim, come on — I met him when I wasn't even fifteen. Chris— uh, Admiral Pike had already been made Captain of the, uh, the—"

"The Oza Butte," he provided with confidence. He'd brushed aside her advantage with a swash of his buckle.

"All right, Jim. I had a crush on Christopher Pike." He didn't reply, just rubbed her muscles still sore from the rigors of snapping and pulling armament shunts during the storm. She looked back at him and said clearly and coolly, all Brit sharpness, "He was young and good-looking, a brave space explorer and soldier who carried dutifully the courage of his convictions. Reminds me now a little of another Starfleet warrior burdened by his "greatness."" The last moment had a familiar taste of her brand of facetiousness. "But the current one pleases the womanly me, not the silly girl." She buried her head back in the thick pillow and stretched her prostrate body for his continued ministrations. "Satisfied?"

Kirk worked his fingers harder against her flesh as he asked with leery innocence, "A crush, huh? So, you and Chris, you never…"

"Jim!" she exclaimed, twisting to face him. "The man was a respected officer in the field, my father's student, and he was, what, easily twenty years older than me!" Then she left that hanging and Jim wasn't surprised when she added quietly and awkwardly, "But— This one time, ugh…" He shifted around but didn't stop, sensually stroking her back, her curves. He didn't need to say anything; he knew she wanted to tell him the moment he raised his curiosity. "I made a pass at him at one of my parents' cocktail parties for commanders of note from the field."

"Always the secret tigress," he noted with a feral grin. " Well, what happened? Spare no detail."

"I was seventeen by then. And between the prestigious science scholarships offered me, my silver at the Olympics leading to the brief but notorious arty holo' modelling for Cassini I gained some celebrity for to annoy my parents, I was pretty full of myself. You understand? I was one in a million Carol. And a seventeen year old's crush, well…" She shook her head and pulling herself up and resting against him, ran a hand through her thick blonde bob. "Boy oh boy, was it a pass."

He passed over her drink. "Feeling that bad, even after ten years?"

"Oh yeah. But he was quite the gentleman, how he turned me down… the lousy son of a bitch."

Carol turned to him, her face lit with that sweet smile with the perfect teeth, and she was lit with something more… literally alight, the blonde hair halo-aglow.

"Wake up sleepy head," she said playfully.

Jim's face, brow creased with confusion, was warm with the same strange light. Sunlight, from Earth's sun.

He was laid out in the deeply sunk hammock, wearing a ratty black tee stencilled across the front with a logo — Riverside High, Class of '49 — in the backyard of what he saw now — a ranch-styled, old fashioned house, a house that belonged, in Jim's imagination, on Earth in the mid or late twentieth century, except a battered BSC Earth-Luna shuttle had lifted off and buzzed past low overhead. Paving stones were laid around a kidney shaped pure blue swimming pool. A dog he'd never owned, a large bull of a mastiff, was charging madly around the yard. An alabaster hand with long fingers, nails painted immaculate cerulean — and a silver wedding ring reflecting the light — picked the nearly empty beer can, to him an antique, not much different than Egyptian pottery — from his chest where he held it in a loose, precarious grasp.

Carol knocked back what was left in the can and, shifting in front of the bright sun, became a silhouette. "You want to get drunk and fool around?"

A grin grew across his face when he heard a noise that didn't belong in that idyllic backyard. Clearly Carol didn't hear it; she was just watching him. But it was so out of place, a hard rhythmic clicking — footfalls — clacking on metal. And then an older man's vaguely familiar gravelly voice, to his right. The voice said, "It doesn't matter what century you're from—" and something somewhere groaned and creaked deep and long, a machine awaking, struggling against unseen, powerful forces. He spun around with shapeless fear and stared at Carol, the sun's shadow thinning to light as she leaned toward him and whispered with concern, "Jimmy?"

"… we human beings have a generally ridiculous belief our best intentions can determine our reality," Agent Two-Oh-One said in his gravel-voice, completing the thought. The click-clatter came from Agent Three-Four-Seven, Maria Twelve, ascending the short catwalk of metal stairs to join them with a steaming pot of coffee. She was dressed handsomely, like her partner, in period clothes, though Jim questioned her choice of knee-hemmed skirt and heels aboard an experimental submersible built for the possibility of combat.

Jim was back in the Nautilus wardroom, not that he'd ever actually left. That is, he'd just traveled from Starbase Twenty-Two on Canaris to some peaceful suburb that was neither here nor there to the depths of a battlefield deep in an Earth ocean, from memory to fantasy to back where he began by way of some self-reflection but as a damn good starship Captain he could work any number of ideas through his head while parsing several conversations. He'd gotten Two-Oh-One talking, careful to limit himself to basic procedural details of the mission but with practiced smarts that allowed him to try and find deeper meanings between the lines.

Kirk's educated guess regarding the two Agents' bribes and salvage work to refit their Nautilus from leftovers at a Navy wrecking yard was largely correct. He was more curious about her crew; a nuclear submarine of the era was manned by one hundred and fifty but even the smaller chopped and channeled explorer craft would require at least fifty men and Kirk doubted Admiral Eleanor Parker nor her Federation Council support would authorize fifty even well-trained Thirty-One adventurers to all go back three hundred years. With a glint of pride, Two-Oh-One explained personally overseeing a small group of Thirty-Ones, anthropologists with starbase security backgrounds, who traveled back to a time earlier that year in the same manner as Jim would, and, dropping the right names and the right money in the right bars in the American south mainly, had tapped into a percolating Right Wing anger. They were disgraced military for the most part, dishonorable discharges who went on to careers as cops or criminals or both, and who believed with fierce conviction that their country and leaders had grown soft in every way that mattered. The clandestine Thirty-Ones expertly whipped up support for a coup d'etat of Two-Oh-One's devising with a renowned air force general waiting to take control of military and international affairs. The signal for the coup would be an "incident" in the waters off Vietnam where a new America would begin to quickly crush the Communist Menace. They'd need fifty men for an experimental sub bound for some unknown nowhere called "the Gulf of Tonkin"—

"James, would you like some more coffee?" asked Maria Twelve. He nodded appreciatively and as she poured, he mumbled, "Oh, so that's what this is." She bobbed her head with a curious little smile, sympathetic. Jim had, in the past two years of exploration, encountered one or two strange new life forms that could assume mock-human shape and behavior but they inevitably failed to get it quite right. Two-Oh-One, with his indifference to Kirk, nevertheless forced a small cough before he told Jim something he deemed important, aggravated he couldn't clear the natural gravel in his voice. Maria Twelve had shown a mild interest in him and his exploits since meeting in Eleanor's streamliner outside Corpus, demonstrating a well-educated formal kindness that seemed comfortable to her when she addressed him by his proper name; she must also have had a cold, turning her head away with tiny, girlish high-pitched sneezes. They quarrelled. Not often, just enough for Kirk to notice, and it was usually over the small stuff like the godawful coffee. But they didn't resolve those arguments by one causing intense psychic distress to the other; no crackling tendrils of cold blue energy leaped from fingers, eyes or mouths.

Yeah, they were human beings. He just found the story of their origins and goals privately imparted to him by one of Eleanor's people, which they seemed to believe in full — no small feat with the famously suspicious and cynical Admiral — to be a little too hard get a hold of, fairy dust. Then again, if he'd told the submarine's bosun's mate that either a couple of months ago or three hundred years in the future - - depending on one's point of view - - Jim would find almost otherworldly pleasure performing a strictly prohibited low atmospheric orbital "pipe jump" while the most wonderful woman he'd known lay waiting for him, sunning herself on a private stretch of Moroccan beach figuring out inverse phase particle ratios while sipping a vodka from the planet Andor… well, at least he'd had the benefit of dealing with unknowns more bizarre than these two unusual travellers.

They were certainly part of the suspicions he was working through, about the mission, but he suspected they simply played their own role in a larger gambit. Those suspicions led most obviously to Eleanor Parker whom he now thought of since their last few encounters and veiled ultimatums as something akin alternately to a spurned lover and the cheerleaders from his high school and college football days. Ultimately, she had, even before Khan and Jim's crossing and return, his manly act of sacrifice, used from her position of power his unique, atypical story as a touchstone for Starfleet, including enlistment, as if he were the stuff of modern myth. Her remarks back in her den about turning himself into a demi-god of human fate having once already risen from the dead was more than her playing him; Eleanor saw him presented as her Apollo. That was one reason why he knew as difficult as the mission might be, it was no no-win scenario. It wasn't suicide.

When he was experiencing the reverie of the deep and swimming with the ponderous yet seemingly wise giant whales, he hadn't been thinking of anything except for perhaps survival should the Nautilus arrive late or not at all. He'd almost emptied his thoughts, clearing his mind in a way that he suspected he owed to watching the Vulcan Spock became in their most dangerous circumstances. Now that he was within the comfort of a leaking old wholesale submarine with a hinkey nuclear testbed and drinking coffee that even a horta couldn't, and wouldn't, ingest in the company of two allegedly superior human beings from a planet that didn't seem to exist who had earlier argued over a taxi cab bill one of them had been stuck with paying back in L.A., that clear mind of Jim's was filling and alive with questions, guesses for answers and a swirl of mysteries that were leading him back to the most obvious explanations.

The foremost and most frustrating mystery of his personal mission was the nature of the mission itself, that what he had taken on meant the end of his life and that no amount of a eugenic Ubermensch's potent blood could revert it this time. But Jim was certain this wasn't true, this suicide business, and not just because it was believed by all of command he had no way out. There were plenty. Between what poor, old Toad told him up front, maybe hoping to make friends with a possible legend, to reading between Maria Twelve's words to, most basically, his continual study of intell regarding the target, continually updated schematics, the accomplished, natural strategist in him saw about a dozen ways of succeeding in this mission and emerging skin intact. Granted, more than half of those ideas were over-complicated as to be worse than unworkable and more farfetched fantasy. But three or four were so basic, obvious, the designers of the target would have never bothered with safe guards.

Jim was beginning to think that if Eleanor genuinely did believe this assignment was an honest no-win, beyond an opportunity to use him as an exploitable myth, she was combat-experienced enough to reach the same conclusions he had, which meant that the "suicide" element may come after he'd destroyed the target. That meant something he hadn't accounted for or understood — he was, after all, smack dab in the middle of a war zone three hundred years in the past — there was the matter of traveling home through time which was a dicey proposition no matter what method one used and which were all out of reach in nineteen sixty-four. Getting home meant returning the way he got there and the best minds in the Federation had yet to figure that out.

His clear thinking had got him righted on something more basic, though, and it was the thing that wouldn't allow this mission to be his last. He'd hoped that the perceived peace of the deep water would relieve him of the violence, chaos, terror of his final desperate moments on the Ticonderoga, and the ugly, awful death — murder, really — of that poor, dedicated kid from Thirty-One. He realized, instead, that the terrible violence would never leave him, that it'd be part of who he was. And that made him think of Carol. And Spock. And McCoy, the Enterprise and his five year voyage and just what kind of starship Captain he could now be. But mostly he thought of Carol and that she meant it when she said she was in love with him and how memories of her, and what he assumed were harmless fantasies about them together in that pristine, timeless summertime backyard were so wrapped now with who he had become. The very idea he'd harbored to proceed at all with what seemed like a death sentence in hero's drag by pretending she didn't exist, that there was no Doctor Carol Marcus in his life did her a rotten disservice. He was doing this for her. And he'd return and find her, time itself be damned.

Kirk made to stand up, to assert himself over the mysterious, strange "Agents," and take control of the mission but his damn fate—

And he dropped back in the chair. Intending to show no weakness in front of the others, he shifted, trying to seem as though he was getting comfortable. He knew that wouldn't fly but casually flicked a glance between Two-Oh-One and Maria Twelve. They shared looks of concern and Two-Oh-One frowned, cold, suspicious.

"Mister Kirk, do you feel unwell?"

Jim was pressing his temples between thumb and forefinger but looked back up. He'd recovered from whatever it was, not feeling dizzy but unsteady half-way to standing and a wave of severe nausea that lasted all of three seconds. He started to respond with a half-truth when Maria Twelve interjected, "When was the last time you properly ate something, James?"

He started to answer, realizing he was falling into her motherly interest, when she added, "Despite the awful coffee, there's a serviceable galley aboard." She had already picked up the old intercom speaker which looked like what they called back then, Jim recalled, a telephone.

"Galley? Wardroom," she said into the mouthpiece, not needing to identify herself; she was the the only woman aboard. She intuitively ordered him steak and fried eggs and Two-Oh-One put her concern, and his own, in perspective.

"You eat something, Mister Kirk, and you'll keep your strength up. We need you at your best."

Kirk frowned at the son of a bitch's sense of superiority but knew what he was saying was essentially correct. Jim sensed that passing, sickly moment had little to do with subsisting on terrible vodka and worse coffee the past twenty-four hours. it wasn't from the abrupt deep dive and oxygen deprivation. It was a worrying after effect of ingesting the experimental senceiver.

"Now, we have sometime more than an hour before you have to reach the target. That's as close as we can get to a shaky historical record of events. I advise you rest, look over the last of our research data we just gathered—"

"We drew as close as we dared to it on approach here for rendezvous," Maria Twelve explained.

"She's that close, the target? Jim asked, surprised. "What's her condition?"

Maintaining cool resolve, Maria reported, "However badly you hurt them from you jet aircraft — scoring topside, the port nacelle was still giving them some trouble — target vessel read as essentially operational."

Jim frowned as he considered this then looked up at her with a smile meant to be read as phoney-brave and he didn't care who saw through him.

"Let's light this candle."

She hinted a smile in return and nodded her understanding.

"Very good, Mister Kirk," Two-Oh-One said. There was something in his voice that grabbed Jim's attention. Two-Oh-One was practically squeezing each word but he had little talent for drama and Kirk knew what he was about to say.

"Target status understood? You need to tell us what happened during your departure from the carrier. Why is the Ticonderoga in flames when that never happened and I'm under the impression that the young Section Thirty-One Agent who made sure you got aboard the Nautilus didn't himself survive."

"Toad was horrifically executed by a professional assassin's jikara but, with his dying breath, he blew up our attackers and a section of the carrier's deck three with a a photon grenade," Jim said flatly. He saw a tincture of uncertainly in the chillingly arrogant man.

"A jikara? That's an Orion dagger."

"Well, coincidentally, Toad was killed by an Orion," Kirk came back at Two-Oh-One with a deadly sharpness.

Maria Twelve stood and as she approached Two-Oh-One, he shook his head just slightly. Jim caught the gesture and his voice seemingly turned darkly light, sickly comic.

"So before I tell you exactly what happened up there, how about you tell me how a cadre of Orion Syndicate thugee turned up on a locked down twentieth century battleship disguised as US Navy military police with the very clear intention of beating me to death or taking me alive. You can tell Eleanor I only undertook this impossible mission under the assumption I'd be taking on only an elite squadron of Klingon soldiers trained for time travel and the crew of their experimental extremely powerful new war ship that brought 'em here. Now, what's the Orion involvement? Don't tell me it's more of that bullshit, their laying claim to Carol Marcus as their slave - -!"

Maria turned away from Jim to her partner and though she spoke in a low voice, it was clear and meant for Kirk to hear.

"We must tell him. Everything."

"How about we start with everything and go from there?" Kirk stated in a way that stood no argument.

Two-Oh-One looked across at Kirk, the two men locking stares.

"Robert," she said, the French-ish accent more pronounced, "He doesn't just deserve to know. It's a quid pro quo. With the Orions involved in an alliance with… them, he needs to know."

"Alliance? Hell," Jim practically sneered. "What's worse, it means we've got an old fashioned mole digging our dirt. How many of our people knew I'd be flying guns on the Ticonder…" Jim's attention shifted away immediately. Perhaps as the commander of a ship in its own foreign waters, so to speak, he heard it before even the two physically evolved otherworldly human agents.

"We've had suspicions, James, about a security leak since we arrived."

Jim's stare narrowed and crawled across the far bulkhead. Whatever it was, whatever he heard — a high-pitched whir muffled by the sea — grew steadily louder.

"Captain—?" asked Two-Oh-One, or Robert. Then he heard it too, whatever it was growing louder; it was racing through the water toward them. "What is that?" Maria heard it as well, instinctively coming up near Jim.

Kirk threw them a warning glare. "Find something steady and hang on tight." He spun behind the glass covered, steel plated Ops table and braced himself against it. Maria joined him in a rush.

"It's the American Navy, the submarine U.S.S. Neville," she asked as if seeking confirmation. He nodded just once, firmly.

"Hang on,"Kirk told her and loud enough for Robert, the Agent crouching behind one of the ward room's three heavy chairs. He looked up as a scratchy, mechanical pipe call whistled over the intercom. And then there followed an authoritative voice echoing through the sub's corridors and work stations. Calm and cool if all business, it may have been the COB but Jim knew a Captain's tone of voice.

The Captain of the Nautilus ordered smoothly, "All hands, all hands. Incoming explosive. Standard torpedoes. Damage control stand ready." For a flash, the danger disappeared for Jim - - replaced by mind-spinning disbelief. That voice…. he was sure. He recognized the easy-going working of words, mid west Fairfield, Ohio transplanted to San Diego. But that was impossible. Last he'd heard, Gary Mitchell was hopelessly AWOL and likely dead—

Then the torpedoes exploded close to the bow, port side, a dull, warped cascade in reverse, and the world went sideways.


	13. A Long Right and a Left Slide

In their second year at Starfleet Academy, Jim Kirk got Gary Mitchell busted by the San Fransisco branch of San Angeles Vice. The details weren't important… largely because Jim told it differently every time. In one version, the three women involved were desperate dilithium miners' wives, in another a trio of self-important, self-obsessed drop dead gorgeous Cadets from influential families and better equipped to be holo'fashion models. The version believed most likely true got to be that way because of its outright puerile popularity due to Jim's vulgar imagination and his command over humor of the foulest taste….

The natives of the Barzini sector's one habitable world, humanoids who looked and seemed made of a child's-toy, stretchable rubber, and bearing lightless eyes in sagging faces, regularly brought a carnival of distinct acrobats, a pleasantly self-described "freak show," to the moon cities of Earth's outlying planets. Barzeens, generally, were extremely, impossibly dextrous by human standards; acrobats could assume positions still deemed deviant, even sexually criminal, in certain human circles. It amused Jim that since his legend had begun to take hold through the Federation, there echoed this "true story" of his appealing to the Court on Io to show mercy on an unknown depraved fellow Cadet and rescued said Cadet from the ignominy of permanent Academy expulsion and a year of hard labor at the Hanks' Basin on Luna. Even Jim had had a laugh at the latest variation he'd heard in Frisco during the year spent mentally and physically recovering and readying his starship for her historic mission; it involved the unnamed Cadet, the seemingly long forgotten Gary Mitchell, and an elaborate set of harnesses and pulleys provided by the hermaphroditic Barzeens. Jim couldn't resist Gary's legacy of bawdy lore even after all these years and corrected the Academy T.A. telling the story as if she'd been there: it wasn't the harnesses and pulleys that got his friend tossed in the civvie can, it was what he did with the bullwhip and the cheap plastic Devil's mask.

"We say again, unknown submersible, this is American Navy vessel USS La Fayette, a nuclear armed submarine," a young man's voice squawked over the futz of the Nautilus' intercom. "We are a nuclear armed submarine. We order you to surface and prepare to be boarded." Kirk turned an ear toward the bridge's speaker. There was just a moment of swish-swash then a heavy mechanical click and the same voice as before… "This the US Navy, nuclear armed submarine USS La Fayette." The slight change in intonation, rhythm – this wasn't a spacecraft with its auto-signals run on "repeat"; there was some kid on the other side of the line, from Tonawanda upstate New York or Huntigdon, Pennsylvania who was either bored out his mind or scared brainless. Kirk looked across the cramped bridge and found himself the only one aboard paying heed to the warning from the now-adversarial American Navy sub. A silent alarm sounded in his head; a low-ranking comm op could let slip his Commander's real intentions through the thoughtless, simple stressing of the wrong word; that was one reason why Jim had long valued Uhura's forthright skills – she'd known him long enough and so well, she could speak Klingoni or even enough of the inside lingo of Tellarite mobsters and translate her Captain's aggravation bordering on hostility into professional charm. Most of the bridge crew were either attending to menial work details while the officers and the Agents, Maria and Two-Oh-One whom she had called Robert, were gathered around a high table and the plastic map the Nautilus Captain had unrolled across it. Captain Gary Mitchell– my God, Jim thought.

Jim hadn't waited for his Agents after the La Fayette's torpedo detonated intentionally off-target, a warning shot; he rushed from the wardroom, down the short metal stairs, through the tight, oppressive corridor to the only room producing noise and the voice he recognized ordering his crew to "cut the bullshit and knock off the chatter. Damage report! Martini, go below and see if we're breached."

Jim, stopped the young tough in the doorway as Robert and Maria crowded in from behind.

"Man your station, kid.," Jim said.

Barely turning around, just twisting his head over his left shoulder, Gary Mitchell smiled at an old friend.

"Hello, Jim! You have something to say?"

Kirk ignored the loaded nature of the question, assuming - - correctly - - he was being asked for his reasoning in interfering with another man's crew.

"That torpedo," Jim said, as the young crewman turned away allowing Kirk to reach overhead, grab a cold water pipe and half-walk, half-swing through the pile-up of control panels and glass marker boards that comprised the twelve man attempt at a bridge set-up, "It detonated a hundred yards away, my guess."

"The proverbial shot across the bow…."

"So unless this…. submersible of yours isn't built as badly as it appears and it's made out of Gorgonzola - -"

"Those clatters and bangs you likely heard?"

"The torpedo's shrapnel?" Kirk glanced upwards, thinking of the bolted and patched together hull he'd seen as he was drawn to the vessel. "Tough little mother."

"I was just sending Mister Martini down there to double-check. Better to play it safe."

"You? Playing safe?"

Mitchell shrugged as Jim came up to him. He _is_ Gary, Jim stressed to himself. He was older than Jim by four months, born in October of twenty-two thirty-two; both of them weren't even thirty yet. But Gary's longish black hair was already showing gray and strongly at his temples. He was in need of a shave and a set of fresh clothes; he looked as if he'd been living in his period wear for a week or more - - baggy tennis shorts and sneakers, a tourist's shirt from some place like Hawaii beneath a leather Navy flyer's jacket. His breath smelled of hard liquor and dirty smoke; he was physically fit and sharp, as Jim could see, but slovenly when he once was kind of fierce about the impression he made. But the strangest thing, and Jim hoped he'd have a moment to ask about it flat out, were the glasses he was wearing. Jim assumed they were 1960s prescription lenses but even in the subdued lighting of the cramped bridge, those lenses were pitch black. Sunglasses? Maybe. But strongly rimmed with steel wire and with side pieces that kept his eyes completely sealed from any light.

Still, Jim knew Mitch was staring at him as he stopped in front of him. "Well," Gary said in reply to Jim's observational, opinionated question, asked almost - - almost - - in friendly jest. "There's something Thirty-One's taught me, Jim…. Something I never thought really possible…."

Jim tried not to seem to be taking Gary seriously…. failed. A small shrug, a smaller shake of his head escaped him…

"If you're smart… really smart, you learn it's possible to change."

The Gary Mitchell Jim knew had the kind of leadership qualities that got his hands dirty, that held the team together whether that involved sticking around for last call or kicking ass and taking names. But he didn't have the right stuff, not the way Jim did – bred in the bone to be master and commander. Jim remembered Mitch telling him he'd happily graduate the Academy with Lieutenant's stripes for life, shuttle piloting the Federation brass to Earth-orbiting Base One as long as he made it back to the beach while surf tide was up. Like Jim, he'd spent an interminable youth in middle America but Gary, then, was no trouble-maker for practical gambling reasons; he didn't see the payout in drawing too much attention too early and always just did enough, in the sciences mainly, and some basic athletics – track and football, he was a decent cornerback – to receive scholarship offers from a couple of notable colleges geared for Earth-based research companies squabbling over starship computer core contracts. He enlisted in Starfleet largely to avoid making any sort of hardball decision and only partly out of respect for his paternal grandmother who'd become a grade officer without traveling any further than Epsilon One Comm at the edge of the system and had briefly served with Jonathan Archer himself, albeit as his bosun's mate's yeoman.

But when Gary arrived on the west coast, the landlubber was overwhelmed by the Pacific. Starfleet Cadet Mitchell made grades that caught a few supervisors' eyes but by then he'd already slipped into what came easiest for him – doing just enough to succeed – as he embraced the life he felt meant for. A beach bum whose natural athleticism turned him into the hottest amateur surfer anyone at Fleet, Academy or Command, had ever seen. He'd remain a surfer for as long as Jim had known him, turning down sponsorship to turn pro as well as Olympian prospects on and off Earth, completing his freshman and sophomore Academy years out of both rivalry and loyalty to Cadet Kirk and the eerily iron will of the girlfriend he'd grabbed the moment he first saw her laying on the sand his first time on the beach. Elizabeth Dehner was all arms and legs and breasts, with sharply cut high cheekbones and, when she allowed it, a wide Long Beach smile. She also had a mind and perceptive sense like a phaser set at its sharpest cutting beam. She even bore the nickname – "Hot Lips" – freshman Cadet Jim Kirk had laid on her his third night in Frisco with pride and irony though she'd offer no other explanation save that the new Cadet, a hyper-intelligent small-timer, was, in her appraisal, a looker, certainly, and one carrying too much to prove for a mortal being.

Despite a campus tomcat reputation next in line only to Jim that Liz actually allowed Gary to maintain as a social experiment – she was an Academy junior cadet about to graduate the medical sciences branch, psychiatry – the fact was, and whenever Liz pulled back his scalp and made the cool-tempered diagnosis he'd openly laugh at her, but Gary Mitchell was driven by devotion. An unusual devotion in that it was spread with his laid back sense of equality and equanimity across everything, and anyone he privately felt deeply about. Liz found it strangely intriguing that the vapors of salt water filling his lungs as the red sun was swallowed by clouds and horizon on his last tube of the day meant as much to "Mitch" as Gary's genuine interest in her latest draft proposal for her Academy Medical Masters dissertation, a complex study, "slide rule" stuff Gary called it Jim remembered, a comparison of fresh-minted officer's reactions to high stress, life or death situations in the rumored five year deep space agenda Starfleet was developing, as opposed to the same officers scores as cadets in psych based tests for command positions, like the Kobayashi Maru.

Jim never had any more time for Liz Dehner's ideas of what made Gary Mitchell tick any more than Gary himself but that never prevented him from winding her up whenever the three of them would get together for drinks, sending her through a psycho-wormhole of her own making and emerging from the double talk aware that Kirk had played her again, leaving her to swear how deeply the farm boy had it coming.

Fact was, though Jim was popular at the the Academy, and equally disdained by those whom he couldn't charm and felt he coasted on the name of a martyr'd hero-father as well as the patronage of the Fleet's most storied active Captain, he had few close, genuine friends. There was Bones, of course, who, from the start, Jim recognized as his good conscience even if wrapped in the guise of a hard drinking grouse. There were a couple of others who, like Jim, would settle for no less than the Chair; affable Ben Finney, too affable, really, doomed Dave Moss, and the looker from Maine, Cat Dunbar, whose angry desperate confusion was the last familiar thing registering in Jim's brain from just before leaving the twenty-third century, twenty-two-sixty-one, and being swallowed by the rolling fog… of Time.

And there was "Mitch," with whom Jim agreed they could be posted on opposite ends of known space for years long, mind-twisting challenges and be able to, when bumping into each other back at Hammerhead's beach-side bar floating off-shore at Bimini, pick up their argument mid-sentence about the over rated quarterback for the Patriots Proxima Achilles-based farm team. They'd gone drinking at Hammerhead's hours after their final written Tac-section exams their junior year with quarterly limited field assignments waiting days away until break. Mitch had just wanted to bust Jim's balls for his novice skills at riding rips, impressing the lovlies on the beach, but Jim, despite the icy booze, got serious. Captain Steve Garrovick of the front liner Constitution-class Farragut had suggested his Security Chief take Jim on as her aide-de-camp for his first duty call, a prodigious assignment that would likely see landing party command. Gary Mitchell had lobbied for and got the relief navigator of the Van Allen-class, USS Wright, plotting low warp milk runs transporting settlement gear to middle distance colonies.

Jim might have assumed this was Gary's typical idea of a joke, his inside out sense of sarcasm, abetted by Liz who'd left a recorded comm pic the night before, warning Jim in her best low tones that Mitch had made decisions about his future he'd find as difficult as she had. But then and there, in Hammerhead's, Gary's eyes told Jim just how serious he was.

Gary's eyes revealed everything if you watched him closely, knew him well. A rare burst of showy anger, a notable turn of the profane and you could see it in his high schooler's stare, his nearly blank dark eyes letting you know exactly what he thought or felt. And Jim's attempt to convince him that he could get him aboard the Farragut as a shuttle driver with, maybe, third tier relief duty at helm was met with that stare and Kirk could read the kind thankfulness there – and the dismissal, his certainty of choice.

Kirk was never that surprised that Gary was reported AWOL two weeks after the Wright had shipped out. It was stranger that Starfleet kept his record active when even Kirk's limited inquiry made it obvious that he'd likely been killed by native ascetics on Tanis for his Earthly vices on R and R. Jim was equally taken aback by Liz Dehner's cool reaction to her lover's disappearance. Six months later she attended a memorial with Jim but barely spoke outside of everyday Starfleet affairs and took the first opportunity to complete her Doctorate observing the crew of the USS Saratoga.

Now that it was presumably clear Mitchell had been drawn in, during that second year at the Academy, to serve Section Thirty-One, or some connected branch, a Junior League of Security-talented cadets perhaps, Jim gathered up another regret about the current circumstances of his mission and its time constraints: he wouldn't be able to ask the man for an explanation, much less tell him how he missed fulfilling his promise to have him aboard his first significant command– -

"Mister Kirk, I understand you have some experience steering unusual ships in unfamiliar places," Mitchell said for the benefit of the sub's crew but Jim didn't bother hiding the half-smile that came with a nod. He'd long had a Captain's ability to judge another Commander's ability to maintain self-control while, as they still called it, "putting' on The Ritz" and he didn't think Mitchell had a tactical leader's thinking down. "You've got a better suggestion on how to pull our asses out of this and get you on your way?"

"Feinting to the surface– Okay, sure- -" Jim, though standing away from the Command Group at the Map Table, had made a silent count of every wrong choice their escape plan entailed. "But an elliptical course, even at top speed, will take too long and their Captain likely knows these waters."

Mitchell nodded his consideration and even with eyes shaded by those odd dark prescription lenses, Jim recognized the look Gary leveled on him.

Kirk was already pushing past the supra-agents, Robert and Maria, who crowded back in around Jim as he pulled away and discarded one plastic map from the command table after another… "No– No– N–Yes! This here, take a look here, Mister Mitchell– What have you got there–?"

"A grease pencil."

"Here gimme–" Jim started drawing across the slick sheet what was, in his thinking, a glide path. His gaze swept over the officers around him, peering in to see what Kirk was sketching out. He picked out the guy he hoped had the skill to pull off his plan - -

"You, you're the navigator? Pay very close attention and do exactly what I tell you. We got one shot at this."

 _Note To Readers : Thanks for reading and I hope you are enjoying "STAR TREK BEYOND FOREVER" (I came up with the title almost two years ago, long before the currently shooting third "Abrams-era" film with its similar name.)_

 _Please post reviews and responses and we can hopefully get a conversation started between readers and good word of mouth will hopefully draw in a wider group. I believe this story-telling adventure is worth my time and yours and that its quite good with lots of adventure, romance, and action and humor to come. Please feel free to both spread the word and recommend this one to friends and fellow readers and contact me directly through messaging with questions, ideas, opinions; I will return such correspondence with all due speed._

 _Thanks!_


	14. Chapter 14 D o w n B u b b l e

The hard, sharp plastic needle dug into the groove cut into the black wax disc. The hi-fi, they called it, Jim remembered. He had bought it at the new shopping center just outside of town, on the edge of town - - the suburbs? - -just a few days ago. And the two heavy speakers made of actual wood that had carved wooden touches at their corners suggesting the exotic Far East, speakers from which he'd heard the music as he'd approached the newly built Ranch-styled house.

No - - he hadn't had to pay for it, buy it, the music maker - - he'd offered, pulling out the black leather wallet, the paper money – but the young man in charge of the store had shaken his head.

"No, sir. We wouldn't thinka that. It's an honor, Captain."

He'd set it up, at her suggestion by the well-stocked wet bar in the main guest space just off the living room. Bending over bit by bit, trying to read the label at the center of the revolving disc - - an LP!…. a way of presenting recorded sound, usually music - - he couldn't help but move his head in time to the gentle fall of recorded piano as it upped tempo.

"Cast your fate to the wind."

Jim looked up and across from where he leaned over the turntable. Carol was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, a dark drink fizzing over ice in a tall, cold-slick glass. She looked at him a little wide-eyed as if expecting him to reply… to say anything, he realized. He slowly stretched up straight, turning to face her.

"You think that's the kind of man I am?"

"Carefree?"

Carol approached and even within the comforts of their home, and of their intimacy, she moved with a crisp economy and Jim felt himself, pleasurably, being swallowed whole. She stopped close to him, her body lightly pressing his and her arms came up, wrists crossing behind his neck.

"Only when it counts." She kissed him lightly, quickly, and yet meaningfully the way she used to back on the - - on the - -

"Good God, you just don't change. Liz called you on it from the start," Gary Mitchell's voice may have been low and quiet for technical tactical reasons but it still had a light, friendly manly rasp.

Jim jerked his head away from the submarine's bridge utility bulkhead. He rubbed his eyes as if to clear them after sleep. Only he hadn't slept. He could recall everything clearly and perfectly and correctly since he'd modified, off the top of his head, a twentieth century variation for a US nuclear submarine of an Academy plebe's earliest graduate test of space-warp defense, the Cochrane Deceleration….

He'd had Maria respond and agree to the La Fayette's orders assuming, correctly, that a Navy commander of the era would be assured by a woman's voice his target wasn't military; and the general European tone of her accent would likewise, he thought from the old spy novels and holos he knew, cement the notion the experimental craft was on scientific exploration, perhaps having lost its bearings. As soon as the adversarial subs breached near each other, Jim threw his old Academy drinking friend a familiar glance and Mitchell ordered their ballasts blown and the Nautilus sank like a stone.

Before Navy had barely reacted, the agent, Roger, ignited an emergency engine re-start and almost simultaneously shut it down; to the twentieth century crew it had felt like an after effect of the deep sea drop and they were distracted by a flare of systems failure lights. Roger, though, had propelled the sub forward so fast it had, for all purposes, vanished from the La Fayette's point of view. Leaning down by the wary sub driver's shoulder like he had in his earliest missions with Mister Sulu, Jim quietly plotted a guide path with a forefinger that put them at a null-engine drift stop where the Navy Captain would likely never bother investigating: practically hull-scraping the aircraft carrier Toad had left damaged and now listing….

The Nautilus had been hanging beneath the carrier for nearly twenty minutes, appearing like a large piece of floating damaged metal off the ship above, and Jim could describe every anxious moment and decision, both routine and challenging, with a Commander's sense of detail that defied an opportunity to day dream just as he knew those images, that "suburban" fantasy hadn't come in the neural flashes of sleep; he'd never seen a centuries old house like that Ranch-style – he even hadn't known you called it that – but he knew there was a big room, the den, on the immaculately kept basement floor with shelves stacked and stuck full of books and paper magazines, newspaper clippings, and record albums. That song, called maybe, "Cast Your Fate to the Wind;" he'd never heard it but could hum it now, every beat, and he knew a crewmate native to nineteen sixty-four would join in. And there was Carol. A Carol he didn't quite know - - did he? - - but _wa_ s her.

Sense memory may have accounted for the feel of her body, briefly, against his - - hard here, soft there - - and the taste of her kiss in his mouth, like a peach or a Christmas orange, clean and fresh, but it didn't mean much, that explanation of autonomic responses, when he realized in the recurring experiences Carol still straightened herself a little before slightly cocking her head when she smiled broadly but he could read the tight arrangement of ideas and emotions layered atop one another deep back behind her wide eyes.

No, these images and experiences, these feelings… Her…. they weren't simply Desire manifested by Desperation. Jim knew, in fact, what this place was and where it was, and had since he stood on the deck of the ship above as Toad intruded upon his messed up reverie staring at Carol's old-styled photo, but he could put it into no voice any more than he knew he'd just, perhaps somehow only moments ago, made her laugh with his hyper masculine act in their Ranch house bedroom, making love to her and showering with her as she worried over the cocktail party they were throwing that night to welcome new neighbors. Or had the party already just happened?

Further still, beyond, deeper than pure sense memory, was the effect the clarity of her - - her voice…. now Jim felt the slow shadow of something unsettled, something just plain not right, creeping over him. Her highly educated Brit accent, so posh and polished - - and privileged - - to a bar-hopping Iowa genius hotdogger, was sharpened by a deadpan absurdist sense of outlandish comedy and made sharper still by a no-nonsense take-charge taskmistress' bearing that made him crazy equally with a Captain's frustration and a lover's excitement. Jim struggled with the memories - - her voice as she warned him again about how some of their old area friends may not take too kindly to the new neighbors, was still buoyed by her smarts, her cosmopolitanism, but it was heavy with an everyday flatness…. no accent…. like she'd been raised in Tacoma or the Victoria Aquaplex. But this _was_ Carol. She had to be….

Mitchell laughed quietly, almost to himself, leaning against the utility station's access cabinet beside Jim. Jim looked up at Gary with practiced, comic familiarity, hectoring, "You don't think being responsible for nearly five hundred souls, leading them into a never ending void has made me…. anything more than a self-obsessed arrogant jackass? That is what you regularly called me?"

Gary smiled, nodded, let out a pull of air that carried a laugh, as he reached up and curiously pinched either side of his nose, keeping his eyes squeezed shut as he wiped those odd, special black lensed glasses on the corner of the old Hawaiian tourist's shirt he kept unbuttoned over a Navy white tee. "Yeah, well - - Actually I was thinking of the first game we played for the Western." He used the athletes' slang for Starfleet Academy's highest tier campus, the Frisco grounds within throwing distance of the long restored and maintained Golden Gate. Jim stiffened a little, uncertain where his presumed dead friend was headed.

"Hammond assembles what may well be the best young team in the game's history and with three genuine nova QBs – Grimsby, Luton and what'er name–? Rowe? Cathy Rowe – and who does Hammond choose to throw the ball, first possession? The smart-ass plebe from Iowa who showed some promise in exhibition play. And what do you do on the Fast Flight up to Juneau? You fell asleep like it was nothing. You're still asleep when McCoy and I haul you from the hotel to the locker room and you only wake up when the running back, plays pro now, Mars Voyagers - - Verna Mackie, she finds a basic way to get your head in the game. Being all exposed for her edification."  
Jim shifted, pulling lightly at his groin. "That's one snap of a wet towel I'll never forget."

"Biggest game in SFSA's annals and only Bones and me know you're no cool Cardassian sunrise but half conscious with an imploding hangover."  
"And became a star when I pretty much single-handedly won the game for us," Jim added with a phony crooked smile.

Gary shook his head, seemingly amused, but Jim's stab at good humor drifted and he made no effort to chase it. "Well?" he said, almost a grumble, turning from the former hell-raiser with a noncommittal shrug. "Print the legend." Mitchell clucked his tongue quietly, shook his head.

"In your case, you are the legend. The real thing. Or on your gods honest way. Not many humans recross the Styx."

Jim gave him a level look, unmistakable in its quietly restless judgement. "Just the two of us."

Gary shifted his weight from the bulkhead and stood over his old friend but looked down and away. "Liz likes to quote Twain when it comes to me, the report on my death - -"

"Liz Dehner knows? She knows you're alive - -?!," Jim hissed in whisper.

"That comm pic she sent you before we took our midshipman's assignments, about the decision I'd made that you wouldn't understand?"  
Jim shook his head; so simple and trusting he'd been and just a few years ago - - he'd sincerely thought "Hot Lips" was warning him Gary had uncharacteristically settled for an "average" career plan running those shuttles, tugs and colonists' transports along familiar trade routes.

"Of course, " Gary amended with a smile Jim felt too friendly, "she wasn't happy about signing a gag order and loyalty oath to Section Thirty-One. But you know her, she gets what she wants."

Kirk looked at Gary, measuring how or if he could maintain that trust any longer. "What do you mean?"

"Part of her deal for putting her husband in the line of fire." Gary held up a hand, his wedding ring. "Contract work for Thirty-One. What they call StellarPsy-Ops - - We keep a lake house on Bellaraphon, a thousand klicks from Serling. Very private." Gary paused, glancing across the nooks and crannies of the claustrophobic bridge that had snapped to low level red emergency lights the moment they hit two hundred with the drop, cleared his throat a bit….

"Look, Jim– I know there are things you want to, uh, deal with other than old football games–"

Jim held up a hand to interrupt Gary buy Mitchell spoke over him, past him.

"And I owe you. I know that. But hell, Jim, when I heard who they'd roped into this mission - - not just Captain of the flagship but goddamn crazy, out-think-him-or-sink like a god damn stone Jim Kirk who can't get roped into anything for nothing let alone a mission that's this hairy. The Kirk I knew and still read reports on is not suicidal. Self-destructive, hmmm–"

"You , of all people, think you know me? Now, Mister Mitchell?," Jim practically spat. "I'm pulling my customary rabbit and then I'm heading home."

"Aw, don't give me your "no no-win scenarios" horseshit. Or is that what you sold to Toad?"

Kirk rested his head back against the bulkhead. He'd discovered one more meaning of self-sacrifice the hard way…. the way they seemed reserved for him…. if he'd only managed to hide those two bodies - - or, better, had tossed them overboard - - but they didn't have the time, he smiled bitterly at the thought, or found the time…. Or made the time as if they were the Guardians.

He'd told Toad to lead the way….

NOTE : To all readers, before we learn about what happened to Toad allowing Jim to flee the carrier Ticonderoga, before the USS LaFayette zeroes in on the Nautilus and something is discovered, as I polish up the next run of chapters - - a treat! A 4 part short story, assembled into a single piece that is a quasi **"unintentional prequel" to** ** _STAR TREK BEYOND FOREVER_** that I will post in a few days after a quick look-over (it was originally written almost 2 years ago.) More on it's origin and what it's about with an introduction but it essentially explores Jim Kirk's and Carol Marcus' first short leave spent together over a holiday. It is titled, _**"A Christmas Trifle.**_ " Look for it shortly.

And, as always, please post reviews for public reading and get the word of mouth going on what I think is a pretty good adventure, and message me with questions, thoughts, opinions...

Cheers!


	15. Chapter 15 Angles and Dangles

**_S_** **AND** ** _S_**

It wasn't long after their submarine had cut power finding its deaf and blind spot under the carrier Ticonderoga, its only energy routed into the float-and-drift, that the mysterious agents, Robert and Maria, having given up their code-numbers around Jim, approached him and asked - - implored - -him quietly to explain what had happened aboard the large Navy vessel. How he had got away and what had forced his Section Thirty-One handler to set off the explosive that, in effect, changed history... the degree to which was currently unknown. Roger was typically brusque, saying the information was for the ultra secret historical record, reminding Jim, again, of the small chance of his return to his time and the chance to have more than a say but substance in his legacy. Jim waved him off but nodded his assent.

He'd discovered early- at least as far back as just weeks into his first semester at the Academy - another odd skill, a talent, really, that he felt assured him a Field Command rank. He was perversely adept at delivering a good report, oral reports in particular. It was his smarts, he figured, working hand-in-hand with his winning charm, though McCoy derided him simply as having a "hyperactive prefrontal cortex." Jim claimed to have little time for self-reflection and aggravated his closest by insisting that as a natural ship's Captain, they could just mark him as a "crazy-as-hell obsessive," But he knew exactly why he could win over superiors or politicos through his wordplay; it was how they didn't react to things and the extent of what they truly wanted to hear - the truth despite themselves. It was the same reason he was a decent poker player, by professional standards, by the time he was fourteen and why he currently was the only sentient life form aboard his ship that could defeat their one and generally unbeatable Grand tri-dimension Chess Master, his Exec and Science Chief. Spock refused to believe his Captain's explanation about his "tell," the small slight scratch, Jim claimed to have noticed, that Spock gave his left temple when he knew he was three, and exactly three, moves from "Check," even after Jim won their second set of the best of three. Carol, who had grown up around men and women jockeying for commands, couldn't reconcile, beyond the charm, the Kirk she read in his own reports and recordings from his first assignment as Captain, before Niburu, with the dynamic athletic man she came to know and equally desire and laugh with over his sometimes stage-worthy ham-fisted goofiness. "We learn by doing," was his only reply to her wondering aloud about his conflicting senses of power.

He now felt no desire to work or read or impress these two unusual humans, Robert and Marie. Even if he believed what he'd been told about them, who they were, where they came from, and he did believe it in that they simply had not provided any reasons for doubt and accomplished everything they said they would but with an understandable degree of struggle, they were still just proxies for Admiral Parker who, clearly, he knew, had manipulated him into this predicament. Still, if he wasn't going to find a way back, there was nothing wrong in keeping his version of events as clean as he could. So he told them, simply, briskly, not stopping to indulge their likely questions.

Jim reiterated that they'd been attacked by Orions disguised in period security armor but Roger waved off his attempt to dig further into those implications - - the thugees' likely means of disguising themselves with the bodily destructive drug Chlorodine-G, coming up short on their method of time travel other than the hit-and-miss slingshot effect, the possible identity of the leak in their own organization, as much as Jim could call it such - - and so he just hit his points as if he were recording an "all stations normal" end of duty daily report for the Enterprise log... He spared a look at Maria though, pausing, knowing what she'd read in that pause... "Quid pro quo," she had said back in the wardroom in regard to their knowledge of the Orion involvement; that look reminded her he'd hold her to that...

Toad had chosen the best debarkation point for Kirk; a fairly small hatch with direct access to the sea and just above the waterline even in the quickly settling storm. They'd reach it by the main passageways at a steady, quick but even pace that would draw no attention. The kid's plan would lead to an out of the way, largely unused spare parts service space and the hatch which Toad had blocked with a crate tape-marked, "31." Inside the crate, Jim would find an era state of the art military deep sea diving suit and gear. Toad claimed his securing the suit was a long story of trades and promises and he'd made a few space age adjustments to the breathing apparatus and oxygen tank that only its original designers could ever notice. They passed crew members, off-duty and those going about their jobs and Toad had served aboard with many of them, working his way, Thirty-One style, into an essentially alien society over several months and exchanged smiles and waves. That's when their situation aboard the Ticonderoga took a nosedive.

"Attention, attention," a voice unfamiliar to Kirk buzzed and bleated over the ship's intercom address speakers and Jim grabbed Toad and yanked him into a shadowed doorway. Before Toad could protest, Jim's instincts proved themselves sharp as ever. Someone had come by his quarters, likely a flier in Jim's wing, and had discovered something he'd likely have some concerns about... the bodies of two gunshot-dead MPs whose bodies were slowly turning green...

" Airman James Kirk is ordered to report to the the deck officer, CPO Linville immediately." As the comm op repeated the order, Jim snapped his eyes on the young man.

Toad nodded, his jaw set. "Plan B."

The reason Plan B was the alternate choice was only because it was a shorter route for Jim to disembark; the problem was, it nevertheless took longer to traverse - - and for the very reason that he had agreed with Toad to take the normally traveled corridors. Plan B involved ducking into a hallway designed for cargo transfer, yanking up the smallest deck plate and descending into work tunnels , past technical stations and up and over catwalks designed for men in safety gear. In the likelihood they were seen by an engineering team or crew chief, it was not going to be easy explaining their presence - - Lieutenant Kirk, one of the ship's elite, a jet ace and general hot dog with a gathering reputation accompanied by a non comm nobody, a friendly yokel deck-Top.

But he'd underestimated the kid's smarts again, Toad having plotted their fall back plan in accordance to crew shifts' schedules and from a glance at the night's assignment docket. as a result, they'd come across only two small groups of workers and the first paid them no attention. The three engineers were gathered 'round a collection of vertical pipes that had all exploded, arguing over the necessary repairs as their soldering gear rumbled with powerful heat and fire.

As they passed the workers, Kirk mumbled, "I guess last night's old time Texas chili didn't sit to well with the crew."

Toad glanced back at him, kept leading them onward, and looked back again trying not to smile. "That's another thing they got right about you-" Kirk waited a moment and finally hiked his brows in query. "You really do have a sense of humor." Toad added, "Y'know, for an officer"

The second group they encountered was at some distance; a work crew knocking off, now in khaki tees and shorts, laughing, they crossed a side hallway way off to the left. The one fella bringing up the tail glanced over, saw Toad and Jim, and when his look lingered, Jim's senses perked. But as he was about to grab Toad's shoulder and hurry him forward, Toad threw the engineer a smile and a wave. The crew man half-waved back; a gesture of half-assed comradeship, Jim thought, knowing they needn't be worried about being recognized.

They jumped from a rusty, rattling metal ladder affixed to a bulkhead onto the landing of what Toad had told him was the next to last deck they'd have to navigate and from there they'd have to move fast but the alternate escape port, one more deck down was "practically right there." Turning a corner, Jim at first thought they'd hit a dead end- - then he saw the outlines of three man-size circles along a wall and Toad went and pulled one open by a handle that had been wrapped in thick black tape. He peered in. It was a simple metal-sided tube angled downwards, their destination on that lower deck, its floor slats, weakly lit. He glanced back at Toad who nodded at him , urging him ahead. The kid's conversation, meant to keep Kirk at ease while on the alert, had dried up and Jim had noticed his body language had tightened, each physical act like high tension clockwork. Toad likely was a good get for Thirty-One's computer stats division and Kirk could attest to his burgeoning skills as a deep cover in the right scenario but clearly, beyond his limited exercises at the Academy, Starfleet's secret security section had not readied him well enough for this kind of high stakes gaming.

"Sir-"

"Toad, relax," Kirk said in that steadying tone he'd seen work well when he spoke so to new crew members often receiving their first landing party assignments. "I know we're under the gun but once we get below there won't be an opportunity-"

Toad nodded in a clipped fashion and said quickly, "What do you need to know, sir?" Kirk could see in Toad's eyes, his deference to Kirk was being very quickly replaced by just doing the job.

"The senceiver," Kirk said but Toad jumped right on him as if he understood the slightly older man's concern. He assured Jim it would work and that the Nautilus would be there for him. He then fell into a cascade of facts, researcher's names and numbers that meant nothing to Jim and were clearly Toad's nervous reaction to the situation; the kid's terrified of failure, Kirk realized - - was that natural for Toad, an expression of the seriousness of Jim's mission (of which he needed no reminder), or is this what Thirty-One did to their recruits?

"Toad - -Toad - - Toad - -," Jim stressed reassuringly. "Don't worry. Of course I'll make it work. No, I'm talking about what you said, about how I could use it- - to send a message - - through you - - to someone in the future... Our future - -"

*************************************************** ****************************************************

"My Gods! Tell me you did not do that!" Gary Mitchell had said, coming up close, breaking off Jim's report to the agents and causing his former friend to turn and stare at him with a bemused, slow smile .

"You have something to add, Mister Mitchell.?"

Gary, moving from station to station around the bridge as they waited and waited for the SONAR indicator to come alive with the LaFayette's departure, had never been long out of earshot. He stiffened a little and Jim knew that behind the strange darkly tinted eyewear his eyes narrowed like they used to in their competitive days when Kirk usually proved himself not only a natural born winner but even a "que sera, sera" loser.

"Captain Mitchell, Mister Kirk."

But Gary's straight, serious, almost intimidating and slightly chiselled features sagged a little in recognition when he saw it... He'd seen it before... many times... And he knew what it meant...

Jim's half-smile had lost its bemusement and had grown wider and ready to take on any and all comers.

Notes:

This chapter has been intentionally cut in two and the second half will be posted in just a few days - - reader response has been very encouraging and I'd prefer not to leave you all hanging too long. However, this chapter doesn't simply "stop" ; rather, it had in its structure a natural "cutting point" (in filmic terms). Please don't give up on this adventure if you are finding being stuck on a submarine to be interminable... it pays off in a way that will bowl you over.

As always , please post reviews to get some conversation going as word of mouth is the best advertising, if I'm the Don Draper I believe I am. Recommend it other friends and readers. And also feel free to message me personally with questions, theories, opinions etc. Every query will receive a prompt reply.


	16. Chapter 16 Angles and Dangles pt 2

Jim, it's a yes or no question. "

Jim locked onto Gary's stare that seemed to penetrate the unusual black surface of his glasses' lenses. He'd lied to himself ; those glasses that revealed nothing, that reflected nothing - - neither what Mitchell gazed at nor what lay deep inside - - had , in fact, unsettled him, unnerved him. As an explorer, he'd seen a wide and vivid array of things and behavior and even natural phenomenon that disturbed his very strong sense of personal reality but whatever he'd witnessed - - the Meletus, Landru's Red Hour on Beta III, or the fact that he and Spock had discovered that a "monster" that could acid-cut and move through solid rock and human flesh also came to a deep, soulful appreciation for the music of Schubert - - the only things capable of really getting under his skin were the oddball decisions, mysteries, made by friends, people he counted on, sometimes even in life and death situations, to do what he never expected of them. His level-headed primary helm officer becoming obsessed with botany, seemingly out of the blue, and just as quickly giving it up when he developed what turned out to be just as passing an interest in old time weaponry like twentieth century hand guns; but Sulu never missed a shift nor was he ever even late and Jim had no qualms from the man's work alone to leave him in command of his ship or leading a landing part into unknown danger.

Jim would never admit such neurotic concern about members of his crew, though he thought by the occasional uncharacteristically cynical glance she threw at him, that Carol had suspected this ; she'd actually asked about it once, what career officers called a "command style," at an inopportune moment of freewheeling and intense intimacy and he'd replied shortly that, no. he was not what some called a ''control freak''' - - he was simply the Captain. And, it went unsaid, one of the things he'd learned as he'd matured as an officer was that a Captain had to expect and deliver a lot of himself; he had to be open to new worlds, new ideas - - that was his very mission - - but it lay in Starfleet's military and even exploratory beginnings, that the mission was just as dependent on him to maintain the status quo and expect the crew to deliver on the promises of just who they seemed to be, what he as their leader could rightly expect of them. It was a delicate balance that required a Captain to be a visionary, an accountant and, if not a psychiatrist, at least mommy or daddy in very specific situations.

What was it Mitchell had told him less than an hour ago? That if a person was genuinely smart, they could find it in themselves to change? He hadn't believed it when Gary had said it, at first, about either of them. In his case, as he once told Carol on one of their first nights out together, walking through the arboretum that ringed the upper level aboard station Deep Space Two during a lay-over, speaking with an openness, a sincerity that later surprised him, "Life…. death…. life, it leaves you certain of a few basic truths. About yourself anyway." In a way, that had been resurrection's downside. His inside-out survival of direct, prolonged exposure to his ship's damaged warp core translated as the most basic and, to Jim, most frustrating of McCoy's prescriptions : bed rest.

And bed rest basically meant boredom.

His days had been broken up a little by Spock's diligence - - daily reports in person on the ship's status, vis-a-vis her repairs, that he and Mr. Scott, Scotty with notable irritation and distress, consulted on with the Star Base One and Division Earth Headquarters Engineers and designers, and leaving his Captain with the dozens of the formal requests Uhura, as acting Protocols Officer, received daily from recent Academy grads and many more about to graduate as well as over a dozen well known and experienced Starfleet officers, all seeking consideration for posting to the Enterprise and her new transformative mission. Specifically under a man who could even defy death, Captain James Tiberius Kirk.

Uhura, for her part, took on his request for some recreational reading but rather than raiding the bookshelves in either his quarters or uptown apartment he'd hung onto, she razed Frisco's notable "vintage district" and brought him an armful of the ancient hardcovers and well-kept paperbacks she knew he enjoyed, as well as a couple of the new "vinyl" music recordings briefly popular when he was a kid, only it was some cool twenty-second century jazz and nova-cool theater music rather than that noise in his library. She'd pulled a thick, very old but nearly pristine hard cover from the stack, laying it on his lap, tapping it with her forefinger.

"I'm told this one's all you."

He'd picked it up with care. "An interesting title."

"It's very old. Nearly three hundred years. It's about what they called 'the space race," she explained, rolling her eyes a little. "You know, the earliest manned missions, the military test pilots they tossed into low orbit like cannon balls."

Uhura had smiled a bit at the look that had crept into her Captain's features - - the flash of light in his eyes, the hint of a knowing smile as he scanned the descriptive "blurb" on the back cover. "They were called the Mercury Seven, Nyota."

He'd read the book quickly and, some time later, picked it up again but between the pleasurable reading and the assignment reviews and even the welcome distraction of McCoy's much too light eventual exercise regimen, his mind wandered. And as much as he fought it, those wanderings took him to the place anyone would explore given a brush with death. And hell, he'd had more than a laugh-it-off brush; his had been the Mona Lisa - - no getting his feet warm, he'd jumped into the deep end and was pulled out less by his own force of will, as Admiral Parker, an early visitor, had insisted he maintain, but rather through the efforts and bravery of Spock, Uhura, Bones, and even Carol Marcus whom, he was informed by McCoy, had acted as his fervent assistant. And of course, there had been the blood that Parker suggested they pretend didn't exist, the genetically altered blood of a long ago eugenics experiment gone wrong, that had unleashed a tyrant and war criminal whose name Kirk recognized only after recovering and skimming through Earth history.

Those questions, as well as his answers, that he mulled in his too-comfortable hospital bed were, he supposed, no more original than those of any other survivor of any other trauma. The questions were simply too big, carried, too much weight for any of the cleverness or smart-ass smugness he could normally get away with as wildly original answers, whether it had been with high school teachers at Dewey or College professors at Hawkeye or Starfleet Officers at the Academy or any of the girls he'd told were different than all the others. The one that recurred most often, the one he could linger over watching ambulance shuttles take off and land from the emergency flight installation on the hospital roof outside his window, was the one that now intersected with Gary Mitchell's remark about personal change. He'd pushed it away at first, fought it off, refused to even acknowledge it. As much a challenging idea as it was an unanswerable question, it was so burdened with cliche, Jim had to take it on if only to relieve himself of its inherent misery.

He'd been given a second shot. The perfect opportunity for change…. to change his life, himself…. What was he prepared to do to make his life happier, fuller? To make himself a better man?

The only problem was…. Jim was already happy and he couldn't imagine a fuller life. He was the Captain of a starship and, he knew, a very good one and had become even better, and the galaxy was his to explore. Of course, Admiral Pike's death was a gut punch and he still carried the pain but even Christopher would have told him that that was the life they had chosen. Sure, he wanted to reconcile with his mother who'd drifted even farther from him after he'd first been given command of the Enterprise. And despite all the women, he'd yet to have a meaningful, committed and long-lasting relationship ; he'd felt close a few times - - with Ruth, with Areel, with Janet - - but that was something that would happen when it happened. Besides, he still had a ship to worry about. He supposed he had changed some after Pike, a man he respected and even admired, had demoted him and taken his command, pointing out sharply that he'd failed to understand even the basic responsibility, the selflessness necessary to lead men and women into the unknown.

But the man who'd charged through a chamber overflowing with a cascading, lethal mix of matter and anti-matter was in Jim's mind basically the same as the kid who sent his Uncle Frank's recreated vintage "hot rod" plummeting down Sutchey's chasm and who, a year later, stood firm and defiant at the disastrous colony on Tarsus IV just as the man he was named after told him to with a confident smile as one of Kodos' militarized robots and two silent, well-armed police-controllers led Grandpa James to what he called, strangely, "the crapper."

But the man with the old-style US Navy Captain's bars clipped to his shirt, staring at him through unnerving glasses with impenetrable black lenses, waiting for Jim to answer as to whether he'd senceivered his Thirty-One contact a message for the twenty-third century, that wasn't Gary. Not the Gary Mitchell Jim knew - - had known. Gary Mitchell had changed.

"Well … Jim?"

"I'm sorry, Gary," Jim said, forcing a smile. "What was the question?"

"Knock off your bullshit, Jim- - !"

"Gentlemen, please- -" Maria interrupted but Jim held up an assuring hand to her.

"Yes or no?" Jim asked Gary. "Yes–"

Gary blew out a frustrated, angry breath deeply held, shaking his head, but Jim jumped on his response.

"However– However, you do realize your question is moot. Toad's dead."

"Speaking of which - -," Roger began.

"What's the big concern, Gary?" Jim asked, genuinely intrigued and also aware of his own tone of voice, an assured tone. It was what Carol teasingly called "his Right Honorable Captain's voice."

Jim couldn't read Mitchell's eyes, but the tight frown that cut across his mouth as the muscles in his jawline worked…. as different as this Mitchell was, that spring coiled mind still had its tell-tales.

"Kirk," Roger said sharply, his business-calm giving way to a hint of peevishness, "just tell us how your contact was killed and how the Ticonderoga was damaged and how badly. Maria and I will have to confer and once we can confirm your report - -"

"Confirm - - What are you talking about? How - - ?" Jim shot a look at Maria who merely gave a look he recognized as make-believe "all is normal" calm as Roger ignored his confusion and continued laying out a revised mission schedule.

"Whether the LaFayette is twenty thousand leagues from here, certain we've made it to the Indian Ocean, or directly a'bow and ready to fire their torpedoes, we're sending you out."

Jim nodded. And he just laid it out. "When I slid out the maintenance drop, there were three of them waiting. like the two who attacked in my cabin aboard the Navy carrier."

"Orions? Chemically altered to pass as humans?" Maria asked, though Jim recognized she was actually drawing a conclusion.

"Yeah. In heavy combat gear, military police. Two of 'em came at me right me with the clear intention of, well, beating the hell outta me…."

Whether he'd caught sight of a shadow stirring or it had been the pure adrenalized instinct he'd learned to trust since he was a boy, but the moment Jim had dropped from the maintenance crawl space, he 'd sprung up from the deck and, in the same move, roundhoused a kick that hit one of the disguised Orions in the chest, knocking him stumbling back against a bulkhead. Almost instantly, a second phony military guardsman was on Kirk, a bicep bulging with thick muscular strength clamping around Jim's neck, throttling, as the giant stabbed punches into his side.

He managed to bark out, "Toad!" just as a warning; the kid had been close behind him in the mechanics tube. Kirk's giant shoved him forward into the arms of the Orion Jim had kicked, then spun on the tube's entry as Toad slipped out. Jim caught sight, a blur, of Toad drawing his gun as the giant sprang at him - - but that was all he saw. His new Orion playmate caught him in a crush-hug that almost immediately squeezed all the air out from his lungs in tightly controlled mean anger; worthy payback for the roundhouse, Jim thought with bleak internal comic timing, as he quickly, improbably, worked his response of attack and escape.

He twisted and bucked against the paralyzing, unrelenting pressure of the Orion's likely intent to render him useless when he felt it. Hard and sharp against his side in a way that Jim knew it was metal. A gun! The handle of the service weapon necessary to sell their put-on American military uniforms.

He shoved his left arm up, against the Orion's monstrous strength in a hasty diversion. At the same time, he worked his right hand down and took blind hold on the pistol's butt, twisting it back, his fingers clasping the hand-hold, one of them finding the trigger. Even as he'd flexed that finger, though, Jim knew, from the carving, the cold perfect smoothness, this was no period-proper U.S. Navy service weapon …

For all their advanced, sophisticated engineering skills in spaceship design and tricky warp drive manipulations which, Jim knew, was partly behind the Federation's desire to come to some form of agreement with them, as well as his own current situation in an increasingly murky-purposed mission, the Orions had long favored their own incarnation of Starfleet's largely retired hand laser to the more complex phaser gun. The phaser was designed to serve as much as a tool as a weapon and, when used as a weapon, it was as effective in its recommended "stun" setting as when altered to "kill." For the Orions, notably those of the so-called "Thugee" caste-cult, their personal laser pistols and rifles were an extension of the killer who wielded the weapon - - brutal, fierce, cruel, savage by Earth standards and entirely in charge.

… gold-white light flared between Jim and his attacker, crackles of high intensity radiation throwing off hot-bright chunks of the Orion as Jim fell back, away. He'd left the laser gun stuck in the Thugee's belt, twisted up awkwardly, one of the Orion's meaty hands holding tightly where he'd tried to grab it away, a sausage of a finger jammed against the trigger, The beam of intense super-heated light burned a hole clean through his gut and as he struggled to stay upright, carved him from torso to chin; the laser cauterized the cut but its effect caused his solid body to split and flop apart. His exposed innards, a butchered mess of inhuman organs spilled out of him in a cascade of thick green blood.

Then Jim heard the gun shot.

He whirled and saw Toad splayed out with his Orion attacker crouched over him at a strange, unnatural angle. Jim drew his semiautomatic, keeping it low, at his hip and aimed at the Orion in his U.S. military get-up, but the assailant remained eerily frozen save for a slight, irregular sway.

"Toad…. ?"

There was no response - - of any kind, not even a groan. But Jim was already feeling, fearing, knew the worst. As he approached, the Orion was staring at him … in a way. The stare was skewed; one eye, the left, flecked with tiny blobs of congealing green was focused on Jim tight, but the right one … . its cornea was skipping in place like it had come loose.

As Jim rounded Toad's boots, the mystery solved itself. However it had happened, Toad had shot the Orion. A head shot. At close range. The entry hole was visible in front along the hairline, like Toad had managed to poke his gun's muzzle just under the Orion's military helmet's rim but likely, from the result, pointed downwards. The rounded back of the helmet, what was left of it, was mixed with what was left of the back of his skull that had been blasted open. It reminded Kirk of a broken eggshell and whatever Romance had lingered in him about certain brands of ancient weaponry was fading fast as he couldn't help but look at the twisted, fatty, fleshy green mess that had been the Orion's brain.

Toad's gun hand was still in the air, the weapon aimed blankly, at nothing, the hand shaking even as his arm wavered as if the gun weighed a ton and Jim, pushing the brain-dead thing hunched over him off, into a pile, dropped by the kid, pulled the gun from his hand and laid his arm across his chest as Toad had kept it aloft trying to pull a phantom trigger. His upper body was twisted, his face turned partly down. Jim rolled Toad up and finally got a good, close look at the younger man and saw how grim his condition really was.

Toad's half-open mouth, his chin, his throat and the front of his uniform were drenched in blood. Red blood. Human blood. Toad's blood. Jim's mind blanked for a flash at the violence ; it whited out and for less than just a single second that felt like it stretched forever as he thought absently, with a barest kind of vague interest, "Oh, so that's the damage that an Orion jikara blade can do to a human body."

The razor sharp weapon was once, long ago, a symbol of Orion passage into manhood among the various castes who would band together to form the religious order-turned-Death cult that Starfleet's human xeno-anthros had half-jokingly labelled the "Thugee" (it stuck). It was given from father to sons upon their first hired kill - - originally of a horned ruminant akin to a bull or steer on Earth, but larger and carnivorous, feral, and later of another citizen suspected of treachery against his kin chosen by the boy's mother, until it finally had less to do with ritual and had become standard business, providing soldiers for the rising "criminal" Orion Syndicate. Now the blade was simply de rigeur Orion fashion, for males and females; worn attached to a belt as a decoration or accessory, rounded dull at both ends. But in a trained Thugee's grip, the extremely thin blade of sheer diamachite would spring from its housing in a flash of defiant silver light as it had clearly done with Toad. Up under his collar bone… . slicing as it slid a direct line through his throat, turning his esophagus into a useless whistle and exploding up into his mouth, bisecting his tongue.

But the damn kid was still alive. His eyes flickered open… Damn.

Jim touched the jikara - - very gently, with his fingertips - - and though Toad didn't react, his wounds did with a spasmodic surge of blood from his neck. Kirk tore a strip of cloth from the kid's uniform, staunched the crazy rush, but he shot a look up at a charge of commotion from the far end of the corridor - -

The third Orion Kirk had seen upon hitting the deck, the one who'd hung back from the fight, possibly the ranking officer but more likely his attackers' grunt, whom Jim had figured was charged with dissuading any actual crew members, humans, from the others' handling of, ostensibly, one of the Ticonderoga's fighter jocks - - that one was turning into the mouth of the corridor, leading four other tall, barrel chested figures in military police garb. In a run. Right at Kirk and the desperately wounded Toad. One of them pointed at Jim and barked something that sure as shit wasn't old time American English - - or any other human language.

Kirk moved around Toad and struggled to hoist him up from under the arms, speaking rapidly, "Toad, I'm nearly outta time for the Nautilus. I'll get you as close as In can to the aid station along this deck. Sickbay's too–"

Toad's hand jerked down on Kirk's forearm and he shook his head in a strenuous effort to state a definitive "No!" With his other hand, Toad pulled from a pocket his damn plastic key ring on a rusty silver chain attached to his work belt. He'd absently played with the plastic ring since Kirk had come aboard with orders he later learned had been computer-orchestrated by Toad himself. But in those weeks before Toad made himself known to Jim, he'd been a bug in Jim's ear, jumping into conversations with Kirk on his return from even a practice run, eager to discuss his Crusader's fly-ability and always playing with the plastic key ring. A nervous habit, Jim had assumed. Now his forefinger stroked the plastic and then he pressed down on it with his thumb.

"Toad!," Kirk stressed in a shout, flicking a glance back. The Orions, thankfully, weren't used to combat in such bulky gear and it slowed them. He looked back down at Toad - -

The plastic key ring started to glow sharp red….. then winked off and on in a rapid, distinct rhythm. Jim recognized that rhythm. He'd seen Tri-lights used in combat scenarios at the Academy's Command school, had used one of the little jewels himself almost two years ago on Cestus III repelling the Gorn incursion. But those produced large, almost sloppy explosions which Toad must have known would sink a twentieth century sea vessel, even one as impressive as the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga. Damn Section Thirty-One and their advanced research opportunities…. for all he knew Carol's concepts and skills could have been used to modify a photon grenade as a precision weapon…. hell, he still didn't really know how deeply her dad had his hooks in her head - - or, for that matter, how much she wanted to make him proud of - -

Then Toad managed to croak what sounded like a word.

"Run."

Jim Kirk ran like a son of a bitch.

"Uh, look, I didn't mean that," Gary told Jim. "What I said about Toad."

Jim looked up at Mitchell, settling his head back against the bulkhead of the utility station niche on the Nautilus bridge. His thoughts on the report he'd delivered to the agents had run through his mind in a flash but he'd nearly got a little lost. Toad was on this mission partly by choice and largely by the orders of others; his life - - his death - - was in no way Jim's responsibility. But the kid had admired him and a Captain took the loss of a junior personally no matter if Toad hadn't technically been under his command. Roger had received the report indifferently, with an attitude of simply doing his job. He'd asked about the size of the explosion, the damage that resulted and the likeliness of deaths - - other than the Orions and the Section Thirty-One contact and would their bodies have left remains. To Jim's surprise, Gary had jumped in and assured Agent Two-oh-One that the modified Thirty-One Tri-Light would have vaporized any living thing in the corridor Jim had described and that he'd done the smart thing barricading himself behind steel in the supply room where Toad had stashed the reserve aqua rig. Jim added that by the time he had slipped away and jumped overboard, the energy released by the blast had not only buckled several decks but had set off a rapidly spreading electrical fire through all the ship's systems which had likely been the cause for the most severe damage. Roger, with a curt nod, turned to Maria who gave him an agreeable look and they had then simply left the bridge, with the silver haired agent telling Mitchell that once things had "checked out," that they'd have to send Kirk on his way. Jim had moved to join them but Maria turned and placed the flat of her hand on his chest, shaking her head. "No, James. Captain Mitchell, usual rules." "Yes, ma'am," Gary replied certainly, "You'll be undisturbed." Before Jim could speak - - "James, if you were in our unique situation, you'd understand." "I'm not and I don't."

"Did you know him?" Jim asked Mitchell.

"Toad? In passing, maybe, on Portmeirion - - an uninhabitable planetoid in the Eridani system. Thirty-One had contract engineers hollow it out–"

"Let me guess. Beneath its poisonous surface, you've got Thirty-One's version of what they called in this backward era, The Pentagon?"

Gary shrugged, almost smiled. "Something like that. Look, Jim, it's not that I don't feel for the kid. I'm not …" Mitchell seemed to search for the right word, causing Jim to lean forward, drawn in by the man's uncharacteristic care with expression. "…. inhuman. But working for Section Thirty-One, you don't make friends. It's very different than serving on a starship."

Maybe that was really always the difference between you and me, Kirk thought, still grasping in his mind for some explanation as to why Gary signed on to an early iteration of the clandestine organization the way he had. He simply nodded then asked, "Gary, why were you so bothered about me trying to use my senceiver hook up with Toad to send a message home?"

Gary shrugged and shook his head. "Well, like you said, Jim, it doesn't really matter now with what happened."

"You didn't answer my question."

"Like I said," Mitchell replied, intentionally flipping his emphasis, "I'm Captain aboard this vessel. I ask the questions."

Jim stood. And took a small step closing the space between them to striking distance.

"Take off the glasses."

Mitchell turned away a bit, then back with an open smirk. "What're you going to do, Jim? Huh? Fight me? You want to fight me? What? You still think you're the seventeen year old shitkicker? Word around Starfleet is you finally grew up; it took death to do it but - -"

Jim held up a hand and barely, with decided cool, shook his head. "I want to see you. Your eyes always gave you away. That's why I always beat you at poker. I'll be able to tell if you've changed like you said or, as I suspect, you're running some typical Gary Mitchell nonsense."

Gary Mitchell maintained his unsettling stare then said, "What is it, Mister Morgan?'

Jim broke his stare and saw an older sailor, heavy set with thinning gray-brown hair and thick eyeglasses, thicker mustache, moving past his fellows and the various bridge stations. He began answering as he approached, stopping behind and to Mitchell's side. "Something's screwy with the sonar. Feedback or something. Unless we got the only iceberg in the Pacific headed our way."

"Let's take a look," Mitchell said, ignoring Kirk and clapping the old salt on the shoulder as he lead the way back to the main stations.

"This is some fine fancy experimental gear those two stuck you with," Mister Morgan grumbled, nodding toward the entry hatch as Roger and Maria returned. " 'Cept that when it works, none a my men can figger it out."

Jim moved to meet the agents at the center of the pincer shape of the bridge, the only open area of the command deck. He kept his tone low but asked bluntly, "So did you decide whether I'm telling the truth or am I a liar?"

Roger frowned and replied with short surprise. "That's not what this is about - -"

"Agent" Mitchell called from the high-backed sonar screen. "You'll want to take a look at this."

Roger waved back, gestured between Maria and Jim as he moved away and she turned to speak to Jim closely.

"James, your truthfulness is not in question. Why would it be?"

"Then what - - ?"

"We were confirming that what happened aboard the Ticonderoga didn't have any significant effects on this branch of the space-time continuum."

Jim did his best, knowing it wasn't quite good enough, to hide his confusion and asked simply, "Well, did it?"

She smiled with a calm sense of confidence. "The damage incurred was officially attributed to enemy firepower and a suspected, unidentified saboteur which gave greater credence to the so-called "Gulf of Tonkin incident." This had an impact of enforcing American willingness to go to war but those effects are too abstract to be cataloged. More importantly, there were no deaths reported. And we found nothing on the two bodies in your quarters aboard her. I suspect they were quietly and quickly disposed of."

"I see," Jim said, mulling it through. "And exactly how did you confirm all th–" It occurred to him fleetingly, but Jim's tone lowered more deeply as he came up closer to the woman. "I realize you have plans to leave this crew somewhere and then scuttle the sub, but please don't tell me you've got some sort of library computer aboard - -"

Maria attempted to respond but Jim talked over and past her firmly.

"Look, you and Agent Friendly over there may be crazier than I already know you are but you wouldn't have risked bringing that kind of advanced technology into a strictly nuts-and-bolts war zone! On a mission that's driven by maintaining historical integrity."

"Of course not James. We stretched ourselves a little with this bridge but our computer is locked safely away in our office. In New York City. That's where Roger and I have been for the past - -" … . she checked her wristwatch. "Fifteen minutes."

Jim just stared at her. "Bullshit."

"Captain!" the young sonar operator exclaimed. Jim twisted around and saw Mitchell and Agent Two-oh-One, Roger, hunched over the sonar ops' shoulders, their faces dancing with green and red tracer lines off the scope. "It's the LaFayette. She's firing !"

"Torpedoes in the water!" called a voice from across the bridge. "Bearing one-two-nine!"

Jim and Maria pushed their way to the sonar rig as Mitchelll looked up, called out, "Maneuvering, right flank. Forty-five degrees down bubble. Cavitate! Cavitate!"

"Young man, out of the way," Roger said sternly, very much Agent Two-oh-One again, slipping into the ops' chair.

"Damage control," Mitchelll said to one of the men who immediately came forward. "Mister Hootkins, post a member of your team in every section. Go!"

"Steady, Captain Mitchell," Two-oh-One said, easing back from the scope but his voice turned to ice. "They're not firing on us."

Jim studied the sonar display, akin, for him, to a common child's play set of one of his Enterprise's rudimentary sensors. An elliptical white smudge, off center, must have been the US Navy sub searching for the Nautilus. He tapped his finger against the large red flickering triangle closing on the LaFayette.

"Looks like your mission just became very simple, Kirk," Agent Two-oh-One said in a long, slow breath. "That monstrous time warping prototype of a Klingon warship you've been sent to destroy before it can destroy planet Earth? We don't have to go searching for it."

Kirk straightened, looked at Mitchell - - his eyes unreadable, his mouth carved in grim certainty; at the silver haired agent who's stare remained fixed on the scope. He felt Agent Three-Four-Seven's long fingers, her soft, smooth palm on his shoulder.

"Yeah, well," Jim said.. "I get all the luck."

To all readers still with me: sorry for the delay in the posting of this chapter. I hope to return to a more regular schedule and within the next 2 weeks, watch for the next chapter, K ' A. (also keep an eye out for the occasional one off short set in my take on the Abrams-TREK 23d century.)


	17. Chapter 17 K ' Manta

" K ' Manta "

Her long fingers moved across the markings on the panel beside the wide tabletop. The emblem of the United Federation of Planets in silver, blue and black - - the outlines of olive leaves, human symbols of peace, the stylized humanoid male and female profiles, facing one another with a star map between them, emboldened circles around Earth, New Vulcan, Betazed, Andor, Alpha Centauri, Rigel Prime - - had coalesced in light over the table, rotating slowly.

"Starfleet identification," the computer said in a dispassionate female voice. "Voiceprint."

"Parker, Eleanor V.," she had replied and, not waiting for verification, added, "Computer, override. There is to be no record of this session."

"Affirmed."

That had grabbed Jim's attention. His C.O. - - in fact, the ranking officer of Starfleet Command specifically in charge of all starship operations, including combat, at which she had demonstrated once and again a unique ability - - had just offered him, not ordered him, the risk and challenge of a mission that, while explaining it in the broadest strokes for it to barely even qualify as "a mission," had likewise assured him its importance likely meant the continued survival and success of the United Federation of Planets as a largely humanity-driven force of peaceful co-existence and exploration between wildly different worlds and cultures. Failure of said mission, their own most sophisticated militarists, statisticians, and astrophysics specialists concluded, would likely mean not only the dissolution of the Federation but very possibly, the end of the human exploration of space and, potentially, Earth becoming just another conquered world under the Klingon Empire which, for almost thirty years exactly, had made unprecedented, and economy enriching, technological leaps forward in their spacecraft design and construction, built primarily as warships, that had baffled Starfleet intelligence. Intel had kept that unsettling conclusion quiet from the Fleet's service personnel, and had lead, in part - - large part, along with mad Nero's destruction of Vulcan - - to the genesis of Section Thirty-One, modelled by Admiral Alexander Marcus and two other, notably anonymous, high ranking Federation officials, all now long dead, loosely upon old Earth's American Central Intelligence Agency and other clandestine services.

Jim's mind was swimming, in the implications of what he had just agreed to, shaking the Admiral's hand, as well as in the depths of another glass of the too-smooth, private stock scotch. Later, he would realize that her flat, threatening statement about being removed permanently from the Captaincy of his ship, and even disavowed by Starfleet, had been at least partly meant to throw him off his game - - she knew him well enough - - but then she had gone on to overwhelm him with details from Thirty-One, with whom - - not for whom, she emphasized - - he'd be working. As a civilian contract agent. Before gesturing for him to follow her to the holo-ops table in a half-enclosed corner of her den, she'd said "Thirty-One will be required to report only and directly to me."

Despite the scotch, he had seen her meaning clearly in a flicker of light in her eyes, heard it in the cold crispness in her tone of voice. If the Federation's leadership, and its President herself, the recently elected aging Vulcan, T'Pol, well-regarded by even Starfleet for her service with Jonathan Archer himself aboard the NX Class Enterprise, were left out of the decision-making process, they'd be freed of any responsibility regarding these events and that left the power over the Federation's future, if Jim had understood her clearly, ultimately in the hands of Eleanor Parker.

The fact that she had told the Starfleet computer tie-in to shut down its basic recording and preservation system, left the words "plausible deniability" hanging unspoken in the Admiral's private den and if it turned out she was more than simply pushing the outside of the privileges-of-command envelope, if she were dealing him half truths or outright lies about this mission he'd agreed to, for purposes of securing her unwarranted control, if not carefully assembling the pieces for an unprecedented, history-busting rogue action, like some sort of admirals' mutiny or coup d'etat to ensure Alexander Marcus' pre-emptive war on Kronos…. Well, Jim had no doubt who'd wind up hanging from that "highest yahdahm" his old friend Cat Dunbar had only half-joked about.

"Computer, go to M-One functions."

The bars of light on the black computer panel turned from red to blue and the rotating hologram of the UFP seal flared and faded. Jim stirred his tumbler, staring into the scotch, as the Admiral ran her fingers over the computer's control board, manually calling up data that was flashing first across the ops table's screens and then as jittery, dancing-floating holograms. Jim paid them little attention, lost in the questions he knew he should have asked before agreeing to Eleanor's terms. But before even a mention of this covert, voluntary assignment was made in any way, she'd raised the subject he had assumed was the point of this "friendly drink" in the first place. And she clearly had no interest in his explanations or arguments; she told him plainly about how Jim's killing the Orion Pasha, Klimt, a key member of their world's Oligarchy, had, mincing no words, "screwed her sideways."

As she laid it out, Jim felt the urge that came by his nature, to correct her, to make a stand, to fight for what he knew was the truth - - but he felt that compulsion slip away without any struggle, and that awareness, that feeling, strangely, made it slip away even faster. Admiral Parker spoke quickly - - not hurriedly - - just with a confidence that famously allowed little coherent rebuttal. She had told him that no matter how proud she may, or may not, have been of him personally for more than simply his bravery but for his tactical thinking, the fact was he had killed one of the leaders of a sector of star systems that served an important purpose in the Federation's ongoing negotiations with the Orions. Without details, she told him that she didn't expect the Federation to welcome the Orions into membership with open arms; the Orions had made it clear they weren't exactly interested in that. The negotiations were about something more complex than simple membership and the orchestrator of this complexity had been the Pasha Klimt. To the ruling Orion power brokers, the leaders of the wealthiest and eldest family clans and the fearsome, monstrous gang bosses of their endorsed criminal Syndicate with their private "armies" of hired and cultish killers, James T. Kirk was a murderer, a political assassin and, by their warped, to Earthers, customs and laws and societal norms, his taking of Klimt's "prize and property," a usurper and pretender to Klimt's power.

"Property?" Jim finally interrupted, almost sputtering. "By property, you mean Lieutenant Commander Marcus."

"And don't you mean "Carol"?" He hadn't responded, knew she had more. "Of course, she has nothing to fear. Nor do you. We're not about to hand her over to clan Klimt - - despite Afa-Klimt Karr 's insistence and threats."

"Karr?"

"Klimt's first son. He's been running their clan under that old, degenerate fool's name since coming of age, about three or four Earth years ago. Your killing Klimt gave him exactly what he wanted. It made you his convenient personal nemesis - -"

"And Carol?"

"She's Karr's as far as the Orions go. And, as a result, he thinks the Federation is as at least partly under his thumb. But I'm not taking chances with her. I'm transferring her off the Enterprise. Get her off the frontier to an Earth assignment. Maybe a supervisory role at the Academy."

Kirk went to say something, his thinking active in his eyes. Eleanor stopped him with a raised hand even before he opened his mouth.

"Jim, we're on emergency time here. With more variables at play than I can count. But an outbreak of hostility is a certainty. You really want Carol out on our command ship, the head of our spear? I've spoken to Karr and he speaks for the Orion armed forces Regulars and whatever element of their Syndicate he holds sway over and he assures me his "slave" is in the mix. Now you can tell her about the waiting Academy position when your leave's winding down. Or I can if it'll make the transition easier - - "

"Daystrom," Jim had said, thinking aloud, working it out for himself. "A few months ago - - I didn't tell Carol about this - - I received a personal communique from Deborah Daystrom asking if I'd be willing to lend them my weaps," he said, massaging the facts; in fact, Ms. Daystrom clearly had assumed arrangements had already been made with Carol, presumably after talking it over with Starfleet Admiralty….. "Carol'd sent Richard Daystrom himself an outline of some project she was developing and it lined up with something they'd nearly given up on."

"What did you say? To Deborah?"

Jim had steeled himself, knew he wouldn't like whatever was coming. "I told them I'd say "no," if it were just up to me." He smiled at her but it held no camaraderie, only dark-humored knowingness. "What did you tell them, Admiral?"

She smiled back, barely - - more a twitch. But it was sprinkled with frost. In his few private meetings with the Admiral, primarily discussing the ongoing Organia-influenced Terra-Kronos negotiations which they'd agreed verged on whatever passed as Klingonii farce though differed on how to proceed, he'd come to understand that frosty twitch of her lips, the way she tilted her head back a little so she looked down at him; it meant she took his smart ass-ery as an allowable defense mechanism - - and even found it, to a small degree, funny… but only so far.

"Deb Daystrom and I travel in a few of the same social circles, so I gave her my two cents, plain and simple. I told her Doctor Marcus is on a very short list of my best science officers working in deep space and, even without knowing a thing about her  
private research, I suspect she will prove to be Starfleet's brightest and most important mind when it comes to the looming problem of advancing our integration of weapons and warp to stay ahead of our current adversaries. Otherwise, I told her she should talk to Lieutenant Marcus' C.O.."

Jim felt it again, more than a sense but less than a certainty of where she was going with this. More than that, though, he felt another twist of that vague but very real anger he'd been struggling against since Carol's kidnapping and his one man rescue of her, his battle with the Orions. And the more he fought that internal anger, the more he'd wanted to hold her, protect her and, even more than that, he'd wanted to deal those green bastards another killing strike. And, despite himself and the better angels of his nature, he was aware that he had no desire to shake himself from that desire. But what the Admiral was suggesting…..

Carol had become a generally popular figure aboard what had been his ship and that went further than the occasional Captain's glare he'd had to aim lately at a few young, new crewmen who'd let their eyes linger over her a little too long in Five-Forward, the Enterprise's ersatz "Officer's Club" (with "All Enlisted Welcome" hand-painted under the authorized signage in what was clearly McCoy's style). Occasionally, it was to her amusement, those lingering stares and even moreso, his glare, Jim had noticed. By Carol's own admission, the degree which she could be well-liked was only partly her own sense of self and, just as much, the influence of her politically charitable mother that had always kept her open and receptive to others. And likely it was her father's military instincts and bearing that had trained her to keep those same people, particularly those she worked with, at arm's length. As a result she had, from time to time, gathered an only partly justified reputation for stand-offishness, and, less fairly, as a privileged icy blonde princess and daddy's girl, though from the crowd at the Starfleet bar on Gesthemeni, she now was as equally and unkindly regarded by some as "the traitor's daughter," viewed with nearly slanderous complicity in her late father's actions. On the Enterprise, though, she had found among its diverse crew, genuine friendship, the kind close enough to call "family."

She had assembled a fine advanced weapons specialty division from the sciences, from engineering, from security and from command strains and had earned their devotion through what Jim recognized as a very clear command style, posing imaginative challenges to both difficult practical problems and confounding though workable theoretical situations and encouraged her people to come up with even more imaginative solutions. It went beyond the always breakneck work schedule, though.

Despite what Jim perceived as their obvious personality differences, Carol and Nyota had very quickly become the best of friends, notoriously at their first chance leading a "girl's night" off the Enterprise on a hard drinking, clubbing and dancing crawl in rare friendly alien ports that allowed for recognizable R and R. Bones still playfully flirted with "blondie", even after Jim had come clean with him about his feelings for her, though she treated McCoy like an older brother whose advice she sought and whose hide he knew she'd be there to pull from the fire. She and Scotty both claimed to be able to drink the other under the table while each mocked the other's latest theories regarding firing weapons at warp, a paper they were preparing together for Starfleet Sciences' upcoming new Lilian Sloane Prize for deep space missions. Her broad intellectual interests, background, and the fact that she had first gained notoriety appearing on a children's holo 'cast that featured competitions of kids who were just "too damn smart," in Jim's words, answering trivia questions and arguing in various debate-styles in alien languages, made her an all around "Miss Smarty-Pants" - - again, her Captain's estimation - - and seemingly always had an off-the-cuff answer for Sulu's most pressing question in regard to his latest weekly hobby that would turn into an eventually forgotten obsession. She pulled Ensign Chekov's leg like the best of them, at his youthful expense and over his idiosyncratic "Basic," though she saw his unique potential as a strategist and had incorporated him as her "Number One" in both weapons test operations and drills, and, without missing a beat, in those increasingly common occurrences when the Captain had ordered battle readiness.

And while she hadn't cracked Mister Spock - - few did, as Jim could attest - - she had made amends for the way she had cheated her way aboard the Enterprise under the Exec's nose during the Harrison incident through her intellectual curiosity and rigour, her relentless work ethic, and the simple respect she clearly had for him as a Starfleet officer and and a scientist. After some time, quickly by Spock's standard, he had returned, well, not the "feeling" so much as an acknowledgement of her "sufficient" approach to all sciences. When her solution to foiling a planned interplanetary bio-chemical missile attack by the thoroughly corrupted forces of the planet Ekos against the peaceful inhabitants of sister world Zeon, the First Officer considered her findings and recommended actions, nodded slowly, his brow creasing slightly, and said, "Most ingenious, Doctor," and proceeded to bring it to the Captain. Jim had later learnt from Uhura that Carol had come to her after leaving the M Four-Three Alpha system and had almost, not quite but nearly, gushed like a school girl over Spock's simple compliment. Jim had taken up Carol's side, saying "Well, my god, Uhura. Coming from Spock? That's practically an open mouth kiss…. Does he do that?" Nyota had cut him off right there.

It just wasn't right that she should lose all of that and all of them over…. what?

He shook his head in quiet surprise and snapped to; Admiral Parker was grasping his shoulder with, to him, unprecedented familiarity.

"Jim, the Daystrom Group maintains the highest level of private security and I was also planning to assign two of my best people within her shouting distance for the foreseeable future. And Carol will be doing what she does best and what she loves. It's the best possible solution until - - Well…" She paused, and nearly unnoticeably changed tack. "This research she's doing, what can you tell me about it?"

Jim shrugged and shook his head, dismissing his superior officer with a distracted wave of his hand holding his drink.

"Look, Admiral, you're throwing around "certain outbreaks of hostility" and "spearheads" and I can't help but think it's got to do with a lot more than some ambitious Orion kid with a hard-on for blonde human women with great legs."

Eleanor began to respond - - but, this time, Jim spoke over her, confidently. "Now, I'm sure you're right; the Orions are probably involved in whatever hostilities you're avoiding with me but they've always got a way of playing one side against the other so that they can emerge with at least the illusion of victory. But I'm making a pretty well-experienced guess that if you are considering the coming of an all-out, very unpleasant war, you're talking about the Klingons."

"Well, yes," she replied, failing a little to keep the uncertainty out of her voice. "But it's complicated and we're getting ahead of oursel - -"

"So, I'm left thinking that if you'll be sending the Enterprise to settle things, maybe once and for all, why the hell are you threatening to remove her Captain who, time after time, has proven himself to be, quite frankly, the best goddamn leader in the Fleet?"

"It's not just a threat, Jim," she had said. It was like iron. But she softened slightly as she continued while still keeping her tone unapproachable. "Jim, I personally chose Detmuller from JAG to run Starfleet's play in this Klimt mess. I knew he'd get under your skin. I was hoping it would be enough to call upon that…" She thought a moment; a careful woman of precision who could use that precision like a weapon. "That heartfelt, damn the torpedoes eloquence of yours. I'd thought- - I had genuinely believed it would be enough for at least Harmon and Donnaghy to come back and give me some usable artillery to throw at Karr and his allies. And what did you do instead? You punched Detmuller in the face and broke his nose in three places."

Jim shook his head as he knocked back the remainder of the scotch in his tumbler, and, sneering, muttered, "Seriously? You're disavowing me from Starfleet and taking away the one thing that means…. anything, in terms of my accomplishments, my starship, because I decked one of your lousy shitbirds?"

"No," the Admiral replied in patronizing, tolerant motherly ease. "You've left me and yourself no choice. Detmuller and the admiralty conferred and it was agreed, the following: That whatever arguments the Orions are, by Federation law, allowed to present to Council, as a human being born in space but rightfully claiming birthright citizenship as a Terran, well, there are no extradition agreements between Earth and Orion One. However, as a Starfleet officer acting personally rather than in the line of duty, technically, things get sticky. Starfleet, as you should know, treats all allied legal systems with equanimity- -"

"The Orions aren't our allies. They are trade partners at best, slim best. And they throw a good orgy, I'll give 'em that. They're dangerous aggressors at worst. They're pains in the ass. My god - -" Jim's face fell with the realization…. "Don't tell me this is about The Arm. It is, isn't it? This is about the goddamn Silver Arm! You're throwing me overboard for a piece of real estate?"

"Jim, don't." And he had seen it, heard it - - that this seemed hard for her. "You know what the Arm means. Hell, it may very well be our future."

He had shook his head in frustration, knowing she was right. He'd continued throwing everything he had at her - - arguments, defences, strategies - - and she had been well readied to counter each as they came. He threatened to take it all public, that he believed Ad Astra, Starfleet's journal of record, had writers who could make their name off a story like this. And her response was a hard truth - - if the details went wide, Jim would rightfully face court-martial which even were he to buck the odds and win, he'd still be ruined, unwanted by Starfleet and having only the protections of any other Federation civilian. And Carol Marcus? She was strong, but strong enough for him to put her through that? The attention she would attract, again, after her father's downfall, would likely see the always secretive Daystrom sever contact and she'd lose the steel wall protections of his security service. She'd be vulnerable to the curious, the unscrupulous, errant mercenary seekers. Orions. Intel had confirmed rumors from Orion space that Karr was financially nurturing proven Thugee, specialists in infiltration, of planets, spacecraft, security breakers, kidnappers. Slavers. Likewise, known to Karr and in opposition to him in a familial and culturally showy power struggle, several of his male kin had taken out bounties on both or either possession of Carol and Kirk's skinned face and scalp hanging from the tip of a jikara. If any of them, Karr or kin, were to take Carol and present her bound and in some humiliating semblance of Starfleet wear, on her knees, addressing an Orion Pasha as "Master" across intergalactic holo'casts, the Orions in accordance with their ancient sense of tribalism and, more fiendishly, a cunning reading of contemporary galactic powers believed they would be a force no longer to be simply "exploited" but, rather, worthy equals or adversaries.

"Give the word, and I'll deal with clan Klimt," he stated seriously, knocking back what was left in the tumbler. "From the center seat of the Enterprise." He waved that away as she replied, "Jim, I did not hear that." The moment stretched until she added, "But I understand. I really do."

Jim himself picked up the bottle of MacCutcheon's this time and poured himself a stiff, very fat finger without offering the Admiral one to share. He knocked it back in one quick, virtuoso swig and, staring at Eleanor, he said, "Well, Ellie, looks like doing my heroic best stuck you with the worst. Seems like I'd be doing you and the galaxy a favour if I was, uh, disappeared? That's what your Section Thirty-one calls it, I think. Or something like that."

"Jim," the Admiral said in a way that demanded he match her laser stare. "Despite your reassuring sense of inappropriate humor….you're not all that off the mark. As you are no longer a Starfleet officer, I can't order you to do anything. What I can do is ask you to do something. Offer you something. Something that is more important than I don't think you might imagine but that you are uniquely suited and ready for."

Jim listened closely as she continued.

She offered him the mission.

"Here it comes now."

There was a short hiss punctuated by a soft electronic pop and Kirk looked up from the tumbler he swirled in his hand to the holo-ops table top as he ran through his thoughts about their discussion and his decision to take on an assignment, what Eleanor had basically described as a search and destroy mission, that even the Admiral admitted seemed threadbare of necessary details but had assured him they were forthcoming.

A holo'containment bubble two meters in diameter floated over the table, visible only in the occasional electrostatic pulse of diffuse soft blue power discharges generating its integrity. Jim watched as a prismatic ripple of light filled the bubble. There were several strange squawks and tuneless echoing whistles over the table's speakers that he recognized as the so-called "sound of space" which faded to near-nothingness as the holo'image resolved itself into a starfield from the point of view of whatever carried it, at first Jim presumed a vessel, moving forward very quickly. Too quickly, in fact, for even the experienced space traveller to get a fix and determine where the image was recorded. And he wasn't helped any by the low resolution and generally poor picture quality though that directed his growing suspicions as to its source.

Admiral Parker glanced at him and said quietly but clearly, "Computer, remove containment bubble."

And Jim found himself, in a sense, in outer space. It was simply because the Admiral had freed the three dimensional recording, spilling it out to fill the den, and with her making a few adjustments at the main board, the picture had corrected itself in relation to the room and its occupants. It even had improved that pesky image resolution in the process; not enough to help Kirk determine where he was looking, in the manner of a map, but it did confirm at least one guess he was prepared to make so it seemed he maintained his cocky command sense of insight.

"I'd have thought Section Thirty-One got to play with all the best toys." He flicked his eyes up and around the room, indicating the recording that had swallowed them. "These DUMBOs were falling out of favour back when my mom and dad were Academy cadets."

Eleanor nodded slightly with a tight smile. She wasn't surprised by his historical knowledge of deep space survey gear, or his use of tech-wonk slang of the outmoded sensor-recorders, Duotronic Mobile Observers, that were built into pieces broken off of asteroids and launched in clusters from a starship's torpedoes tubes in the early days of star mapping and espionage, often for purposes of first contact preparation. Nevertheless, she was impressed enough to ask for the giveaway but the smart ass had her down and answered before she asked the question.

"The phase variance gives it away. Slips out of sync the faster the DUMBO moves and this one's feeling the pull of a nearby body. See that smear down here?" He stood and, walking through the image, pointed to a tiny, easy-to-miss distortion. "A state of the art system, like the Cooper-Hawk, and you'd see that's a nebula, maybe, or a dissipated gas giant."

Kirk shifted, following the DUMBO's viewpoint as it turned sharply and shortly and fast-dropped in order to avoid a hurtling, fiery hot stray asteroid throwing off pieces of charred black rock. For a quickly passing moment, he remembered his first experience with holo'data presented in this way and how one of his study group, a Cadet named Styles, had fallen over when the map room seemed to twist upside down. Then Kirk nodded at something he saw and as things started to make at least a touch of sense.

"This mission, it's taking me to Klinyx?"

She followed his stare and found the slightly misshapen greenish - dull gold planet coming out of eclipse over her right shoulder with its tell-tale constant flashes of red lightning in its upper atmosphere. Eleanor worked the computer's main board and the room itself seemed to arc around to place the planet in the centre of the ops table. Jim instinctively reached out, unnecessarily he knew, to grab hold of a chair to maintain his balance. Maybe shouldn't have been so quick to smirk at Howard Styles' piker's response way back when…. had heard at the Captain's Summit he was now Ex-o on the U.S.S. Faisal, the Antares-class starship kept in Earth orbit at the Federation Council's disposal.

"How do know with such certainty that this is Klinyx?

Steady again, Jim crossed about half the room, behind the planet-image, and reached up, pointing at a something more substantial than a simple point of light.

"Kronos," he said matter-of-factly. "I noticed this distortion off it, like a cloud, when the DUMBO passed. That's the Praxis graveyard. I saw it on scanners and up close when we went after Khan." He punctuated his explanation with a forefinger circling the desolate stretch where the remains of the once massive energy producing facility had been overworked and poorly managed leading to the devastation of the Kronos moon. When his finger brushed against the three-dimensional representation, Jim was startled by an onslaught of readouts, a rush of alien alpha-numerics in fuzzy green and white, that seemed familiar without being recognizable.

"This intel didn't come from Thirty-One. It came from the late Pasha Klimt. Almost half a year ago."

Kirk snapped around but before he could ask for any helpful details, she tapped at the computer board. "Bring up five-by-one. Delta-Delta-Delta," she said softly and the top-of-the-line computer, now reduced to not much more than an automated and mute adding machine, adjusted the DUMBO's point of view to its direct line of sight…. in a fast orbit of Klinyx which now took up most of the room.

"Tell me about Klinyx," the Admiral ordered in a softly hectoring fashion that caused Jim to grind his teeth, having forgotten that irritating aspect of her superior sense of more than her rank but her strong ego. Spock had politely but with a rare look of discomfort had referred to her attitude as being "needlessly pedagogical."

Jim let out a short breath and replied quickly with what he expected she wanted. "It's the second outermost planet of the Kronos system. Although it's technically class M, it is almost uninhabitable by human standards although the Klingons have established a city-sized outpost there - - called Kho Kuut, I believe - - that is essentially a land base for the Klinyx orbital shipyards which the Klingons have no problem proudly maintaining as their worst kept military secret due to its rather hard to believe productivity - -" He paused, studying the planet surface and outlying space; the drone recorder was now moving too fast for its structure to maintain much longer and its shaking suggested it was bouncing crazily off Klinyx's atmosphere and the land base's tachy-shield, the image breaking up into static and assembling into shape again and again.

"They're building the K ' t ' Ingas here, in these yards," he said, "But space chatter suggests they're still only in dry run condition… a good five years before they're a threat…." He was speaking in a quiet, distracted voice, straining to make out the sprawl of the shipyards ahead; great lattices of steel hanging in space in all directions, no make-believe sense of up or down. Sections of unfinished warships held between the metal frames as Klingon engineers in armoured EVA gear, and in work pods that made Jim think of a praying mantis, jetted around them - - two or three of the obsolete D-7 heavy cruisers and what seemed an entire wing of new D-4 platoon-carrying attack fighters - - supervising gangly, ancient repair robots reprogrammed, inadequately Jim guessed, for high care construction. And then - - STATIC - - and he saw it for maybe all of three seconds. Or he had thought he had seen something. It was no doubt what she wanted him to see. Had to be. The image flared blindingly and went black.

Jim hadn't asked for playback; he knew the Admiral was bringing that last image up on line already. Instead, he observed, down playing his confidence and expertise, "They took out DUMBO with heavy duty auto-phaser cannons. High level security weapons. Shipyard's within their capital system. They've got something they aren't ready to show off just yet."

"You tell me," she said, though that touch of superiority in her bearing had cracked just enough that he could sense she had indeed brought him here for something more than beheading that Orion son of a bitch. She needed him, for this mission. And whatever he carried inside of him. He was, after all, still Jim Goddamn Kirk.

The image of the section of ship works that had caught his attention filled the room, frozen. It was largely a messy smear of work platforms, canopies and metal moors around what looked like a group of typical Klingon battle cruisers.

As Eleanor worked the manual computer panel, she said, "Computer, isolate two-by-four at nine-by-seven. Augment and enhance."

The image shimmered and, as it zoomed in on a crossing of green tracer lines, snapped into half-perfect, somewhat wobbly focus. But it was enough to draw Jim close, to walk slowly toward it as it hovered slightly above him at an off-kilter angle, surrounded by three of the Klingons' normally impressive and intimidating new class of high speed, heavy cruisers with their green and gray plated shields bristling with weapons. But the three K ' t ' Inga class warships, though of largely similar size, shape and destructive power, seemed like shadows compared to what they were guarding over, compared to…. it.

If Jim had shifted his intonation, his stress on a different combination of words, he'd have conveyed his appraisal of what he'd assumed was likely his target on this mission that went without record, as one of his typical bad jokes in worse circumstances….. "That is not a simulation, is it."

"No," she had answered simply, adding what was certainly no mere afterthought, "It's the K " Manta.


	18. Chapter 18 Kmanta (part II)

They'd bolted from the bridge...

Maria's speed and dexterity surprised him. It had helped that after returning from her cabin back to the Nautilus bridge, and, according to her, in a way Jim largely assumed was an impossible put-on but couldn't entirely discount, after a quick trip to an apartment in New York, she had changed clothes. In place of the era-exact clingy sweater, pencil skirt and heels, she was more suited to the unexpected change in mission specifics, wearing a heavy cloth jumpsuit and a pair of what Jim was half-sure were called "sneakers."

She led Jim in a rush down the cramped main passageway that lead through the center of the submersible and into the engine room where they had to hump over a generator engine block to reach a hatch to the lower level. Jim hoisted the hatch door open and, not bothering with the coiled chain link`ladder-of-sorts, hooked to the wall, dropped through.

When he landed on the deck, pulling himself straight from a crouch, Jim staggered. It had hit him .again, that sickly feeling; an uneasy queasiness. Or maybe a queasy uneasiness, he joked to himself in that way that made Bones grumble epithets when it came to his Captain's humor in regards to his health. His sense of direction a little skewed, he went to follow Maria and bumped into the bulkhead. She was there and on him before he could trip back over himself, grabbing his right arm as her other hand went around his back.

"This is more than you missing a good meal or two," she said. "What is it?"

"Whatever it was, it's passed. C'mon, let's go." He slipped from her grip and strode steadily forward. Despite the narrowness of the corridor, the tall, slim woman slipped in beside him and he realized there was no point in ignoring her expectant stare.

"I think it may be that thing Toad stuck in my head."

"The senceiver? We were told it would dissolve away in a few hours. Long enough to complete the mission," she said with just the barest skepticism. "There were supposed to be no after-effects."

"Yeah," he said, slowing. as a stray patch of overhead light seeping down from the main deck threw strange shadows ahead. "They said they'd used my most recent full physical and concocted this one just for me, So the kid told me. Off my electrolyte balance, blood pressure, a scan of my engrams - - They must have missed something..." He stopped abruptly. The floor plating on the corridor ahead was only half there. The rest was a spider's web of metal supports half-finished, stopping in mid-air and temporary walkways of unsecured wooden boards.

"You and Chuckles up there, when you contracted the construction of this hulk in bits and pieces you seem to have put all your efforts topside - - the bridge, whatever's in your cabin - -"

"The wet bay is up to your standards, James. Don't worry," she said calmly, indicating their destination. Maria was already slipping past him and, finding poorly fitted metal protrusions, used them as steadying handholds as she began inching her way with grace along the curved wall that would have joined the deck floor grates. "Just follow me and be careful."

Jim shook his head as the irony struck him; he was known for having a sense of humor in difficult situations, short of genuine tragedy and life-threatening dangers to his people. Spock had come to acknowledge his Captain's sensibility, with a most Vulcan frown, as a necessary aspect of his command style personally beyond Spock himself. And even Carol, with her familial sense of leadership responsibility, hadn't quite known to make of him during her first few weeks aboard the Enterprise. As a result, while this might in fact be, depending on the truth of what he'd been led to believe, the most important and impossible mission a Starfleet officer had ever been tasked with, he couldn't help but find a degree of absurdity in what it boiled down to. He was heading out to single-handedly destroy the most sophisticated machine ever in human experience, a space vessel that was essentially a weapon larger than the old aircraft carrier that had brought him to these waters and he was getting there in something, in his era, was not far off from a child's wind up bathtub toy. A child's toy with pieces missing. But, as he'd discovered before forcing his quick exit from the Nautilus bridge , what it lacked in practicality, it had made up for in imagination.

He now took quick stock of his circumstances and glancing down at the open and uninviting ballast tanks that took up most of the space below, discounted his dancer's grace that had once impressed Carol - - and, being honest, so many of the women he'd charmed - - and left Maria to skillfully almost crawl the bulkhead. Then he saw something poking through the darkness above him about a meter away. Several things - - curved pipes, likely for the shipboard water supply that, the darkness be damned, seemed to reach the next solid patch of deck plating underfoot. Jim jumped - - and grabbed hold easily of the nearest pipe and swung - - with more effort than he'd thought he'd have to expend - - to the next...

Earlier, Kirk's frustration had started to turn angry. Pointless, he knew, as his anger was aimed specifically at the triangular red blob of light flickering on the Nautilus' sonarscope., and that damned light hadn't moved for too damned long. It had to be the the K'm"anta. A winking marker centered at the bottom of the screen was a fixed point representing the Nautilus while a code of letters and numbers - - US003 - -was the LaFayette, sharp, tiny green arrows indicating its North-West drift. But that triangle was stuck there, frozen...

Jim was considering the possibility that the US Navy submarine had incurred some actual damage with the two torpedoes it had fired. The early intel Admiral Parker had shown him that had indicated the K'm'anta could operate in practically every environment imaginable hadn't surprised him; he'd commanded the _Enterprise_ , at a measure of daring risk, into the depths of the great sea of Nibiru and kept her down there, against his Chief Engineer's best instincts, in hiding, for almost half a day and, more recently, after the ship had been drawn into an area of so-called "dark space," they'd emerged and navigated through thousands of kilometers of strangeness that McCoy had identified as being not that different from protoplasm. However, despite its impressive construction, matching its strength to its adaptability, the K'm'anta still could have had a rough trip traveling back in time; in fact, Kirk thought that likely knowing the questionable method they'd used and because their intel had made it clear the Klingons' operation was meant to be enacted from a low Earth orbit, using the three D-4 assault-troop heavy fighters allegedly docked in the K'm'anta's football field-sized underside flight deck in the vessel's rear engine's section, to disrupt events in Earth's history at a notable turn. On top of that, he'd seen it had been damaged from his Crusader group's strafing runs the previous day.

It was a feasible scenario: the Klingon prototype, traveling back in time via a barely tested and unpredictable experimental technology damaged by something as simple as being grazed by an asteroid or a chunk of ice no larger than a tennis ball that had been pulled into its chrono-filghtpath, emerges in Earth orbit, presumably in its target year but with systems compromised; they manage a crash landing in the Pacific Ocean and submerge, willfully or not, avoiding detection and effecting repairs as best they can - - repairs undone by the Crusaders from the Ticonderoga and leaving them vulnerable when the United States Navy submarine had fired its standard torpedoes that had detonated against the K'm'anta's hull, crippling it, forcing it to a dead stop and setting off a cascade of systems failures to the already weak and failing engines, weapons, electrics, life support that would climax... in a catastrophic... core implosion... at any minute... any minute... any...

The triangle of light, shimmering and almost imperceptibly jumpy, remained solid. And still. Unmoving...

As if it were waiting...

Waiting for him.

A hand gripped Jim's shoulder and he looked up to find Gary Mitchell staring down at him through the damn black glasses. Instinct told Jim, finally, that Mitchell had obviously, somehow suffered some damage to his sight - - likely pulling some stunt gone wrong or some careless act of bravery - - and, notably proud, would avoid discussing it. Well, Jim had thought, if this mission's actually not suicide, as he'd figured and Gary could pull off his contribution, they'd have time yet to work a few things through. "You want a better look?"

Gary hadn't asked it as a question. He was looking off, across the confined bridge space, where Agent Two-Oh-One, Roger, was joining Three-Four-Seven, Maria Twelve, who was working an old tumbler lock in the bulkhead beside the unused, and bolted, utility station where he'd rested just moments ago.

"I'll join you as soon as I batten down the hatches," Mitchell said with a hint of that old jokey sarcasm that Jim recognized as he pulled himself away from the sonar to make his way across the bridge. "Mister Kiminsky, resume at sonar," Gary said with, Jim noticed, easy authority. "Pilot Rawlings, maintain course, down bubble eighteen degrees. Convince zero-zero-three we're her shadow."

Maria had held the door at the utility station open and followed Jim in, locking and auto-bolting the door behind them. Jim had expected finding not much more than a closet for technical gear. Instead, he'd discovered himself in a dark alcove, the only light coming off the board of what he recognized as a vaguely familiar variant of a computer from his time, fthree hundred years, just about, from the here and now. It was as if he'd stumbled across a forgotten, out-of -place data post if not aboard his _Enterprise_ , then a predecessor.

"I think you're going to have to do a whole lot more than simply scuttling this thing," Jim said to her in a quiet voice, not even looking at Maria Twelve with his attention on the details of the "utility storage" itself.

Her reply was typically soft of voice, but straightforward and cold in tone. "In five hours, James, presuming Mister Mitchell's efficiency with this crew, the Nautilus will no longer exist. Nor will it ever have existed."

Jim finally looked at her; her abruptly cryptic sense concerned him and she could clearly recognize that. She said nothing else.

"I have a good image." Roger stood straight from the computer's main panel built into the bulkhead. In Starfleet terms, it was a "single station" - - no chair, just a console with a monitor, generally set up for a specific task and tied into the relevant systems of a starship. The serious "Agent" had been staring into a viewer that had risen from the panel as Jim and Maria had entered. Spock had used... would use something similar for research at the Enterprise's library computer. And Chekov's new and increasingly useful security and weapons station on the bridge had a "marksman"'s personal scope that Pavel and Carol had nicknamed, "Bulls' Eye" Roger looked at Kirk and nodded down to the viewer on the panel. "The devil's in the details, yes?"

Jim moved to the computer as Roger made room in the cramped space. He adjusted his stance to compensate for the slow arcing feel of the deck underfoot; the Nautilus was adjusting it's position in relation to the movement of the LaFayette which, Jim would bet period-appropriate money on, was moving in a little closer to the massive, motionless object on their limited sensing devices, possibly even intending to provoke it further. He leaned over the viewer, pressing his brow against the screen's upper frame.

At first- - everything was black, a black smear. Jim's right hand had instinctively moved along the viewer's smooth metal cowl, searching for a focus control, when the screen itself, on its own, snapped a sharp grid over Jim's field of view. He realized that the scanner's system was adjusting itself to his vision particulars... then the grid had faded... and there it was. The Klingonii experimental time-jumping prototype warship, the K'm'anta, crisp and clear. As Roger had indicated, it was some image.

Jim's first thought seeing it, strangely, he realized much later, had been of nuclear American submarine, U.S.S. LaFayette's skipper. If that gentleman could see what Jim had been looking at, he wouldn't be nosing so damn close to the overwhelmingly large mystery hanging suspended so far beneath the water's surface with its rapidly flashing emergency running lights at it's heavy hanging nacelles and at every angle of its sharply cut weapons stations aligned along the powerful looking secondary hull. That skipper would have immediately come about and ordered the fastest course possible, or impossible, back to Honolulu. That was, if he didn't pitch over face first with a massive coronary.

It loomed from the darkness of the Gulf's early morning deepest murk, beams of weak, very early morning sunlight wavering through the water across glimpses of its heavily plated body and the more artfully created command section, the rounded, so-called - - by jaded starship Captains - - "skull," with its array of domed officers' stations and communications towers, attached at the far end of the long neck, away from the nearly toxic, distinctly radioactive air circulating back in the engines' section of the secondary hull, or "the body." Jim heard Roger shift around beside him, intending to grab his attention but he just stared at the K'm'anta, noting which decks were showing electrical lamp light in the "skull"'s portholes and running the play he'd devised really just a few weeks ago, by his body's time clock, after telling Carol he'd be back in an hour or two, aboard the U.S.S, _Akula_ as Captain Cat Dunbar warped 'er to the shatter point, in running combat with those goddamned missile-hurling high-speed kill-ships that came out of nowhere but near enough to the valued Silver Arm for Jim to take a good guess. He caught sight of a heavily patched up area of the command skull that had been an air lock, the metal hull plates around it bent and twisted but firm. He considered the problem potential and mentally crossed it off his mental list as a possible secondary entry point.

Roger made that odd throat clearing sound Jim still noticed when he was about to say something he considered important. "They've made a few notable changes since that last piece of intel we watched together in Texas. With Admiral Parker. When we met you."

"Yeah," Jim murmured. It was hard to miss, hanging there, the command "skull" staring down at them; the Klingons had added a physical deflector shield of a sort around the bulbous bow of the warship and its distinctive shape was of little surprise to Kirk. "Yeah," he repeated, more confidently. "That arrowhead plate up front. The test with that damn portal that Orion bastard, Karr, had his specialists design for the Kling taught them something. Just not enough."

He'd pointed out the likelihood of this redesign necessity early, just after his introduction to these mysterious "Agents" in Parker's high security Silverstream, going so far even then to lay odds on the conical deflector as the Klingons' quickest answer to the damage almost impossible to avoid in the beyond-ultra-high speeds their means of Orion-designed time travel likely required. At that gathering he had surprised Eleanor, guessing correctly the content of the Section Thirty-One data-holo before the Admiral ran it for them. And then he went beyond the limitations his new role as her "hired gun' would normally allow. He'd pointed out to her, and the mysterious strangers, "Agent Two-Oh-One" and "Agent Three-Four-Seven" agreed, " a "simple" time jump, say ten minutes into the past - - staying there just long enough to confirm success - - and back again, would have been as effective a shakedown for both the vessel and the strange portal, as one could best call it, as traveling back a thousand years and, from his own experience, would make no immediate difference. "The Kling barely qualify as imaginative thinkers but as they've got some Orion brains in their, shall we say, employ - - ?", he'd ventured. He still remembered Admiral Parker's response, its unintended absurdity. She had shaken her head tightly, completely dismissive of what she took from his implications - - that a simple and straightforward all-out, very short war, as unpleasant as it would be and seemingly in violation of what the Federation and its Starfleet stood for, was the most temporarily efficient solution to the galactic power playing humanity may not be prepared for, and she had said with a self-assured nod, and not a touch of the comedy Kirk had taken nonetheless, "Our Orions are better than their Orions."

The very notion of time travel as the Klingons' mission-intent for the K'm"anta, in fact, hadn't even been given much serious consideration by Parker and her extremely small circle of intimates and for what was, at the time, good reason. That was until that meeting she'd had with Jim to remove him from command and disavow him from Starfleet for his "criminally self-indulgent actions" at the Captains' Summit on Gethsemeni during the Governor's Ball... for rescuing Carol from Orion slavery. But it had been at that meeting that Jim and Eleanor Parker had had a sharing of minds that he had first taken as an encouragement. Now, he had realized, instead, if it was not quite a death sentence, it was exile to Elba for reasons he couldn't yet fathom...

"How long do you make her? Admiral Parker had asked that Sunday afternoon. "Bow to stern."

There was little in the images collected by the DUMBO, feeding the hologram that filled Parker's den, that offered any sense of scale. The two nearest K't'inga class warships were each, separately, encased in spider-type dry docks, with only their command sections, their "skulls," exposed for a clear view, poking out of an assemblage of metallic workers' beams and massive robot-arms. But there was a third vessel, also of the new warship line, hanging far off in the frozen distance of the holo'image, almost indiscernible It was likely stationed on a patrol, a guardian for the prototype. Jim had walked up to the three dimensional shape carved from light, determining that it would serve his purposes and asked Parker, "Admiral, can you enhance, uh..."

He almost immediately threw away his mental calculations and gestured with his hands and arms a rectangular space around the distant Klingon warship.

"I see where you're going," she replied, her attention already on the computer's main board, uttering soft vocal commands to the device as her fingers worked. The warship, which appeared as not much more than an oddly shaped, green-white pinprick of light, enlarged and took more recognizable form and dimension as the Admiral's fingers plucked it from its frozen place and drew it the distance forward and placed it alongside the K'm'anta, the computer adding color and texture based on data already gathered.

As she superimposed the K't'inga over the K'm'anta, outlining the warship in blue, the prototype in red, concentrating on fitting their forward sections together exactly, Jim mused aloud, "If the subspace chatter can be believed, this new warship's about ten meters longer than our refit-Constitution class."

"Fifteen, to be precise." Jim glanced over at her and she added, adjusting something on her panel, "Thirty-One got their hands on a copy of the schematics."

"Well, this K'm'anta, you called it? Looks to be only about another ten meters in length. Not much of a difference. Show me the whole enchilada."

"It's just coming up," she replied, having already set the program, knowing he'd ask to give it a good look.

Jim watched as the K't'inga class vessel's image faded to half-strength and slid away some, leaving the K'm'anta to twist upright, rotating as its missing spaces filled with enhancements and details provided by the computer.

"Thirty-One's work on this is outstanding," she said, not disguising her pride. "They think they got it within fifteen per cent, worst case." She rolled a small input on the board - -

And a holographic gyroscope formed around the prototype, fast-running data floating around it. The image of the vessel turned and swiveled, allowing for a full study from every angle. Kirk took a moment, studying the layout, halting a flash of specific data with his forefinger, moving in closer to the image of the ship - - but only a moment, as he had suspected she expected. Then he said with a touch of deadpan, "It's a real Klingon piece a work, that's for sure."

"And?" Admiral Parker answered back and he had known she was just about done tolerating his humor, just as he had even earlier begun withholding the obvious question burning in his brain through the scotch the moment he had first seen the DUMBO's image of the K'm'anta; a point Parker had been professionally ignoring 'til the moment he would call her on it.

"And? Well, it's only a little larger than the K't'inga class, in length and across its widest point in the secondary hull, its engines section. And, like the K't'inga, its got the same oversized - - I believe they refer to their ships' nacelles simply as warp pods, as far as the literal translation goes. The Klingons must have a version of Section Thirty-One - -" After a moment's hesitation, she nodded with a shrug. "Their new, heavy style of warp pods were clearly taken from the schematics of our refitted Constitution class. Probably from the _Enterprise_ herself- - I mean, look at those radon dispersal vents indenting the corner line - -," he explained, reaching through the gyroscope and pulling the K'm'anta's port-side propulsor into plain view.

"All right, Jim - - so you know starships. That's one of the reasons you're here. But what's your point? I assume there is one."

Jim fought back the sharp, smartass, knowing grin; she'd just thrown a lousy, lazy, careless pass - - a sideways admission of ignorance about this Klingon prototype and she needed him - - that he was going to intercept and take 'er all the way.

"As a matter of fact, there is, Eleanor. As much as these two vessels look basically alike, and are largely structured the same, basic way, their new warship and this monster of a prototype - - by the way, you are sure it's a prototype? They're not secretly cranking out parts, running them off the off the assembly lines in those rumored factory planets on the far distant side of their would-be Empire and putting together a fleet of these things?"

"It's a prototype, Kirk. I have assurances from the best authorities."

"If it seriously comes to a shooting war in space, I wouldn't want the Fightin' Fifth to drop from warp, say, in the Shadow of Klinz'hoa only to find a combat wing of these K'm'antas stretched across to the Khu Ket."

"It's a prototype."

"Well then, this prototype and their K't'inga warships, for all their similarities, are different animals entirely."

Her frown grew more severe, bringing out the well-earned lines deep in her brow, at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and she poured them each another generous shot of liquor. "How so?," she had asked and, so, cemented Jim's certainty she was, in her skillful, professional passive-aggressive manner, either forcing him to put the pieces of his mission together himself, possibly as a means of fostering a sense of inclusion, or more likely, angling him to provide her with substance for that one vital piece of information she hadn't even alluded to yet.

Jim had picked up the tumbler and swirled it, and had stared into the deep, rich oaken amber hue of the old scotch for just a moment... barely even a moment. But in that barest fraction of time, his thoughts swirled as deeply and thickly as the drink...

She'd convinced him to take on a mission that, she claimed, held the future - -hell, the very existence of the Federation in the balance, a mission of such an unlikely and challenging nature that the admiralty, in its private parlance, had given such assignments the innocuous code description "edge-work," meaning it had, with all their best possible people and pieces at play, a fifty-fifty chance of resulting in anything remotely considered a success; if it worked, at best they'd maintain the status quo, failure would be failure to an utterly incalculable degree. And all he'd been told, thus far, of what he'd agreed to do had been that it would be a search and destroy operation, the target an impregnable piece of space travel technology deep in territory controlled by adversaries who considered him a "political criminal" and had put a large price on his head. And, on top of that, he still had Orion assassins to worry about and deal with. All of it had left Jim assuring himself, "I've got 'em all exactly where they want me."

But none of that meant he was going to be a cog, not even a vital one, in somebody else's engine not even Starfleet's.

Jim took a deep pull off his tumbler - - "Hey, easy, Jim!" the Admiral warned, "That stuff's not yesterday's glow water." - - and felt the scotch kick him in the ass as he crossed with purpose to the faded image of the K't'inga class warship and slid it with an open palm into the center of the holographic starscape whereupon it restored its color and detail. Jim explained that despite its intimidating aesthetics, the new class of battleship was largely a strong example of what he'd come to believe, through experience, as the Klingon culture's "inherent intellectual limitations." Despite a deserved reputation as driven combatants with a cruel, cold but efficient sense of power, Jim had figured out their adversary's playbook after only a handful of encounters in space and in planetary conflict. Putting aside the specifics of Klingonii history and their alien belief systems, their weakness was the weakness of militarism as inarguable dogma; following orders, doing as one's told, committing to authority with the assumption that authority's representatives primarily have one's well-being foremost in mind or, more importantly, society's as a whole. In terms of their technology, such thinking boiled down to a straightforward "whatever works..." mindset. The new K't'inga class, Jim told Parker, appeared to his eyes, as basically an upgraded refit of their D-7 Heavy Cruiser, a fleet of vessels that had served as the workhorses of their Empire for nearly as long as humans became aware of the Klingons' existence. They'd stripped the D-7 down, chopped and channeled its basic components, plated its surface skin with heavy, elaborately designed armor that doubled as phaser cannon and torpedo launching emplacements in addition to it main guns a'midship in the engineering body and its primary photon tube at the bow of the "skull." Its design both did away with the D-7′s pretenses of serving Klingon sciences and deep space exploration, and, it also was as pure a physical representation imaginable of the Klingons' guiding principles: speed, stealth, and unstoppable, aggressive destructive power.

That's why the K'm'anta posed a problem for Admiral Parker, Jim had realized.

He pushed the K't'inga aside and, gesturing to the hulking prototype starship, excused himself from stating the obvious but pointed out that it was just as powerfully armed as the K't'inga class battle cruiser but far more armored, heavily so, likely for reasons other than what Jim guessed its deflector screens would be designed for in flight. In fact, it reminded Jim of the aero-amphibious "tanks" developed on Earth at the end of the Last War, some time in the mid-twenty-first century, that had caught his attention in history class at the Academy Command School; strange, monstrous automated killing machines and troop carriers that looked like a cross between a rhino and an armadillo done up in the gear of an Arthurian knight.

The long neck of the K'm'anta appeared shorter than that of other Klingon warships but only because it was built up in thick layers of tyro-steel, notably so where it joined the engineering hull. And it was at that connection that the K'm'anta varied most significantly from standard Klingon design. There were two large rounded pylons, each the size of a Starfleet shuttle up on end, atop the ship's "body" on either side of that thickish neck. The pylons had been heavily plated over and were studded with industrial output jacks but, here and there, work unfinished, they revealed insides of coiled heavy golden wire. Studying them up close, he'd asked the Admiral if they were the results of Thirty-One's guesswork but she assured him they were sourced directly from in the DUMBO's scan-data.. She added that she agreed with and was proceeding from her Agency team's suggestion that the towering pylons were part of a new engine drive system, possibly even a Klingon attempt at transwarp.

Jim shook his head, pointing out the oversized half-bubble warp core that covered almost a third of the prototype's underside. If Klingon engineers had discovered, or if Orion confederates had sold them, some new intermix formula that could somehow harness power impossibly vast, say the full energy output of a dilithium-based star, that core was large enough to make the hypothetical instant-leap to warp nine and have room to spare. No, Jim was certain those two large pylons had some other explanation; however, he kept it to himself that he knew they knew the importance of the pylons were at the heart of the mission. If agreeing to their "edge-work" was the price he'd pay for saving Carol Marcus from a life of Orion captivity he'd pay it again and again, but he figured Eleanor Parker, Admiral of the Fleet, could meet him half-way. And, deep into his cups, he'd enjoy it too, making her.

"In simplest terms, Admiral Eleanor, if the K't'inga is gonna be the Klingon fleet's running back, this K'm'anta thing, here, is their linebacker. Look at it-" He swiped a hand at the image of the prototype, his gesture slicing through the holo' that rippled and distorted and quickly re-assumed shape. "It's built to take a pounding. A hard one. Problem is-"

"The Klingons don't play a defensive game."

Jim touched his nose with a forefinger and pointed at her with a slight, knowing smirk. He had to struggle through the vintage scotch but he had always been a fairly good drinker,; that would make the struggle a fair fight even if his thoughts were coming a little faster than his mouth was working and he was also thinking and orating on the fly...

"But your bigger problem, Admiral, is that - - that that means what you've been keeping from me this whole time. I'm not here ... 'cause you want- - that is, you didn't, for lack of a better word, just fire me for killing that sick bastard Klimt. You're hiring me to tell you just what you're up against. Your secret agent spy school blew this one and because I'm pretty damn good at knocking the Kling back to Kronos, you want me to tell you what this thing, this K'm'anta thing is because whatever it is it has got you and likely alla Thirty-One scared to death."

"Scared?," she answered with what seemed like surprise but Jim could tell from the flicker of her steady steel eyes, and how she glanced away, that her reaction had taken some effort.

"Eleanor, please," Jim tsk-tsk'd. Open palmed, he slid the K'm'anta holo' between them, causing it enhancements and add-ons to disappear and leaving just the image of the spacecraft as it had appeared in its construction dock. "Look at this thing. Its unfinished and, likely, untested. And you said you're certain it's a prototype? It's one of a kind. That leaves plenty of time to determine how to take it out - - even if this war you see coming is intended to weaken our fleet. That means we both know what this thing is? Don't we?" He had shifted his look from the K'm'anta to the Admiral. "Don't we?"

They had spent the just about the next hour, or however long it took to empty the bottle of MacCutcheon's, surrounded by the holographic stars and distant nebulae within view through the atmospheric glow of Klinyx discussing, arguing specifics, details. But the tension in the den had thinned once she had admitted just what terrified her, what Jim had already figured: that the K'm'anta was a single use, single purpose creation. As much a weapon as a starship. The Admiral had gone so far to call it a "doomsday device;" a conclusion Jim couldn't quite accept. "And I had come to think deep space command had cured you of certain idealized misconceptions about strategic thinking. Don't tell me you don't believe this may well be a no-win situation."

She'd clearly intended the observation to be taken at least as a touch of tough-minded humor, but there had been a deadly despair there hat Jim could hardly miss.

"Well," he answered after a moment. "I don't. I'm just thinking this through with logic. A bad habit I've picked up somewhere in my travels - - " He stopped abruptly then charged ahead in an entirely different direction. "You're giving the Enterprise to Spock after I'm - - gone." He'd spoken the words as a statement of fact.

"Jim, Mister Spock is a unique and vital asset to Starfleet. He'll be taken care of, as will your entire crew. And I will personally see to Carol's well-being. Just as we discussed."

Jim had sunk back into the heavy leather-cushioned old desk chair, slouching and sipping his scotch; goddamn me, he thought, with genuine anger aimed inward, as the realization sunk in deep that since he first saw the DUMBO's image of the K'm'anta,, meeting the Admiral's strategic challenges almost as a test of his personal worth, he hadn't thought of Carol. At all. And he was supposed to meet her in New York, at the hotel bar- - in less than three hours. And there was still that thing he wanted to pick up for her. As a surprise. Hell, what am I going to say to her -

"Jim," Admiral Parker said, surprisingly soft of voice. Jim had shaken himself, almost physically, from the distress he'd locked into and looking back at her, for a fleeting moment, he was convinced she was capable of reading his mind. She almost smiled at him a little, sadly. He closed his eyes, rubbing his eyelids with the thumb and forefinger of hiss right hand, He had been looking through a liquor haze. "I think its time we finish for today.,"

She was already standing when he had opened his eyes. She had moved around the ops table to the computer and disengaged the holo' setup returning the den to its normal appearance. Jim concurrently had twisted his head a bit and found his dress hat over on the floor by the Eames chair.

Parker shifted her tone, her body language to small talk, the everyday, as she walked with him to the the door.

"I have a meeting in the next hour that is of absolutely no importance - - the Tellarites' new D and T man- - uh, boar. And then we have dinner plans. I assume you'll be joining Carol this evening . Starting off in the morning on your whirlwind?"

Jim nodded shortly. "Yeah," was all he managed expressing, at an utter loss. She was actually chit-chatting after a meeting introduced with dire warnings about his future and both Carol's, his lover's, career and safety as a result of his actions saving her from would-be allies on Gesthmeni, a meeting in which she asked him to undertake an almost impossible mission with little likelihood of coming out alive. And it wasn't a put on for some purpose of distraction; just her way of decompressing, he suspected. He was only now feeling it himself, the extent to which this had been no ordinary strategy session. Thunder rolled away again in the distance, northwards now, Jim sensed, and the rain had started falling again after fading away some time ago.

He'd been pulling on his formal uniform jacket that he couldn't even remember shrugging off, adjusting it when she asked, without changing her tone, if he'd committed to memory the private and secure contact code she'd provided him earlier and he repeated it back exactly as his answer. She'd also reminded him to send her their travel plans as soon as Carol had inevitably prepared the itinerary Parker expected of her. "The girl's smart as a whip, mind you, but the impulse control her father carved into that hyperactive brain did a pretty thorough job on her spontaneity."

Jim's back stiffened a bit at that. He bit off his immediate sharp reply and simply said, concentrating on fitting the jacket's fastener, "Well, she's not exactly the woman... you knew. And she prefers not to talk about- - him."

"Of course," the Admiral said through her faint smile. "I'm sure. Here - - " She'd reached behind her and pulled something off her belt and handed it to him: a plain black communicator, smaller than Starfleet duty issue, still in its manufacturer's electro-seal. "Its unregistered and emits a VPS. No one's going to know about our intel drops, no one who's not authorized."

Jim slipped the communicator into a pocket and pulled his cap out from where it was tucked under his other arm.

"Shall I call a taxi for you? Or I can have Lana drive you right to Command Transit. You will still be assumed to properly have all Officer's privileges until, well," she hesitated. But just barely. "Until I give you the mission go-ahead."

Jim shook his head. "I've made arrangements."

As he had lowered his hands after brushing back his hair with his fingers and fixing the dress grays cap in place, Eleanor reached out and took hold of his left shoulder. "Jim, I need to know something."

He looked at her uncertainly but she clearly read that look as openness.

"What's the flaw in my logic? About the K'm'anta. We agree its a weapon of singular purpose," she that with presumed certainty; less so when she had added, "With Earth as the Federation's capital its likely target? It seems obvious to me."

Kirk had then apologized for the overcooked dismissiveness he'd expressed if only because her thinking, in fact, made a lot of sense. It could very well be bang on in terms of their mutual general notion of their intentions for the K'm'anta. He went ahead and had reaffirmed her ideas and the possible scenario she had offered partly as a basis to make his disagreement clear to her and partly to give himself a moment to put into words his "logical" deduction which, at that point, existed as not much more than the random flashes and collisions in his mind of colors, numbers, and increasingly complicated shapes that comprised what he had once dismissed as simple intuition.

He had agreed with her on the current state of Starfleet which had not only been kept from the public but most of its own personnel remained in the dark as well. They still had maintained and were further developing superior technology, including faster starships, like Cat Dunbar's U.S.S. _Akula_ , that could push it to the warp barrier of nine point nine-five-five-five and keep it there for longer and farther jumps; and increasingly powerful and even more precise phaser fire power and other space-combat ordnance, including smaller, more physically manageable photon torpedoes with larger yields which he knew had been one of Carol's projects prior to the Enterprise. And the Academy 'continued its unequaled tradition of graduating cadets into service who were continually better trained, quicker thinking and even more professional than each preceding class, and for whom courage was a rarely talked about part of the job. "Starfleet Academy's best come prepared with the Right Stuff," he'd summarized to the Admiral.

But in reality, Starfleet was still recovering from the events of the previous five Earth years - - recovering from the mad Romulan from another time and place, Nero, who had destroyed not only a planet with an ancient, sophisticated society vital to the Federation's workings, and his friend Spock's world, but also a full one third of Starfleet's most ready and active vessels... From the superhuman, historically important and genocidal war criminal, Khan Noonien Singh, who had assassinated, in a single attack, three 'Fleet Admirals, including his mentor Chris Pike, and the notable, highly respected and valued Captains of the starships Antietam and Endeavor, and subsequently brought down mass destruction and a still untallied death count, likely in the tens of thousands, upon Starfleet's Earthbound Central Command and the entire city of San Fransisco... From just a year ago, on Tau Primus, the messy results of the dissident takeover of the Federation embassy there, including public executions of the ambassador and her diplomatic team negotiating rights for a Starbase to be built in orbit, and the still unexplained destruction of the starship sent for a rescue - - and which had occurred while Kirk was virtually on the opposite side of the galaxy, commanding the Enterprise from the Auxiliary Control section of the derelict U.S.S. _Constellation_ against a massive space-going alien... mechanical thing that he'd compared to a "doomsday machine" and which Spock simply listed in his science logs as a "planet-killer" after the best their advanced weapons specialist, Carol Marcus, could come up with was throwing up her hands in frustration once she'd determined that it likely originated from outside their galaxy. It had destroyed eleven planets comprising two solar systems and two Starfleet personnel transport ships, each with one hundred and fifty aboard, and had disabled almost to the point of utter uselessness Matt Decker's Constellation, en route as the first responding starship. If, between the efforts, primarily, of himself and Spock, Carol, Scotty and reliable old Deck, the mysterious monster that seemed to exist to feed itself upon the source of any form of power, would have decimated the most heavily populated sectors of Federation space. Kirk's "doomsday machine" alone may well be the last announcement of Starfleet's and, ultimately, the Federation it served, precarious existences.

"Have I got you right so far?" Jim had asked her.

"Mmm-hmm," was her casual assurance he had. While he had worked his perception of Fleet status through, Eleanor had moved with purpose to the bar and had fished something from an ice bucket filled with cork screws and swizzle sticks from Officers' Clubs clear across to Starbase Eleven. From a small tubular container, she shook out two tiny diamond-shaped emerald green pills and popped them in her mouth. Jim recognized the latest pharma-cure-all,, a remedy that people he knew swore by, providing a sort of instant sobriety, or close enough anyway, due to the excessive consumption of real, straight alcohol of Earthly origins. Jim shook his head when she offered them to him.

"My doctor doesn't like me taking pills without his prescriptive say-so."

"I'm looking for new personal medicine man. Heard McCoy's one of the three or four best we've got. A bit of a hardass, though?"

"Admiral, Bones is the best there is. He's out of earshot, so I can say these things. But your personal M.D.? Not a chance."

"So," she said firmly, wasting no more time. "There are clearly things we agree on regarding the current situation. I must assume my flaw in logic, as you see it, is in their strategy, the scenario I laid out."

Jim bobbed his head noncommittally, thinking how best to answer. "Yes." He held up a hand, warding her off. "But I spoke a bit out of turn. It's not a flaw in your logic so much as it is the benefit of my personal experiences."

He had then proceeded to tell her that he agreed with her that the Klingons would initiate things, likely with actions that went beyond being simply provocative, actions that would demand a response in kind. They wouldn't just fire on a starship patrolling a disputed border this time, as a show of colors, or an unclaimed sector of largely open space; the Klingons would more likely destroy that starship, she'd claimed, without explanation or apology. But Jim did her one better, or more disturbing;; it wouldn't be a starship - - in fact, the target would likely carry no weapons other than obsolete lasers - - say, a scientific research explorer with a crew of harmless eggheads or, making their intentions crystal clear, a civilian passenger transport, filled to capacity with traveling workers, aliens from across the Federation conducting business, tourists and their families... a lot of families on those low warp or impulse-driven ferries.

Within an hour, he'd said, so sure of himself he was adding more details to her scenario, she'd have ordered and engaged one of the Admiralty's full-out aggressive stratagems, likely Warp Attack Plan "R" which, he knew, she'd had more than a hand in shaping. Jim didn't know the specifics of the Board's every call, but starship Captains, one and all, knew "R" - - it was the second most extreme use of, in the rarest of extremely rare circumstances, that no less than the Founders of the Federation had allowed for, full and unrestricted employment of the military combat potential of Starfleet and its associated armed forces.

And, at first, they would quite likely be entirely triumphant, proving victorious in one staging after another and for the simple reasons he had discussed with her; Starfleet's unalterable mandate was for exploration, knowledge and keeping the peace but they were as ready for immediate combat, if not more so, they would hope, than the reliably combative Klingon Empire. But for all their strengths, the Admirals at Command and the starship Captains regularly engaging the adversary in deep space, would soon come to the awful realization that they may be winning battles but somehow they were close to losing the war.

The reasons for this were two-fold and obvious to experienced hands such as the both of them, thinkers and fighters. Firstly, there were, again as they had discussed, the disasters endured and attacks that had caught them unready since his last year at the Academy. But there was also the confounding, inarguable reality that the Klingons existed within a self-perpetuating, self-mythologizing war culture. They lived - - and died - - by belief in war. This was more, far more, than the dogmatic militarism Jim regarded as elementary to their weakness of imagination and inventive free thinking. War was the engine of their economy and their technology. They taught the necessity and strength of war as a guiding principle to their children in school. The current government, a Chancellery of sorts that had existed for over seventy years, had long ago forbade all of their native population and beings on conquered worlds, any expression, or even private belief in, any form of religion, or the fostering of ancient myths and fables - - it was common lore the Klingons had no "devil" - - because they had shaped and would continue determining their own destiny and it would be achieved through war.

So, even as strongly as Jim believed that their enemy had bought into its own fairy tales of miltary and knife-weilding-gun-slinging prowess, he did admit to the Admiral that their belief system left them perpetually prepared.

And at the first sign of Starfleet weakness - - a minor skirmish gone wrong, a newly promoted Weaps mishearing an order to stand down - - leading to their first barely notable loss of territory... the Klingons would launch the K'm'anta, with a crew of proven fighters and engineers, on a direct heading for Earth.

Jim embellished the Admiral's scenario again, suggesting it would likely warp under the protection of an armada of K't'inga class cruisers that would engage the Starfleet Divisional "Wings" Eleanor would have waiting for them at the outermost edge of the Sol system. Once that conflict erupted, the K'm'anta could likely make it onward, easily destroying automated defenses, and achieving Earth orbit.

"And then what?" Jim asked, at last answering to the flaw in her thinking. "They perform their ritualistic, uh - - What do they call it? The Klingon variation on that old Earth fighter pilot's last resort, Kamikaze… _kavitas_?"

"Providing they don't miscalculate and take an ocean plunge, they could do some damage," Admiral Parker suggested with little conviction, knowing his reply.

"That... bastard, Khan? He took out Starfleet Command, the Academy and almost half the city but we were back up to speed in less than a year. And the Vengeance was almost three times the size of this Klingon thing."

She made another try. "Even if our defense force cuts the K'm'anta to ribbons, if it's crewed with their best, they only have to get their bridge for operations, the engines for propulsion - - even if it's only impulse - - and their- - ," she hesitated just slightly, for emphasis. "Their cargo into low Earth orbit, even the upper reaches of the troposphere, and we'll have lost... not just the war. Everything."

"That cargo bay, it's packed with canisters of some incurable Klingon virus we've never even heard of?" Jim clearly wasn't convinced

"Something like Andorian Cetracoliosis. It thrives and multiplies in nitrogen- oxygen but we had their doctors to help us out of its plague potential. Still we lost, fifty-five hundred in the Benelux."

"Believe me, our doctors would like the challenge of finding a cure for the common Klingon cold."

Admiral Parker shook her head, trying to clarify what she saw clearly. "It doesn't have to be a disease, Jim. Thirty-One 's heard subspace rumblings. Very reliable rumblings. What passes for a Klingon scientist - - their Einstein, I guess - - might have cracked the code on stable Trilithium. More likely, one their well-paid transwarp Orion geniuses."

Jim could see from her look that he hadn't hidden his surprise all that well. "That would punch a hole the size of Australia half-way through the planet," he replied. "It would set Earth back to some kind of Dark Ages for the foreseeable future but we'd get through it. Starfleet already has auxiliaries . You'd move to Alpha Cent-" Jim had broken off, and swung back on point. "Eleanor, you've essentially hit on it, the flaw in your thinking, the benefit of my experience."

"Enlighten me."

"The Narada. A Romulan ship from the future, some other future - - Nero claimed it was a mining ship but, hell, I was aboard that monstrosity. It made the _Vengeance_ and K'm'anta look like moon shuttles. It was going to destroy Earth like it destroyed Vulcan with a weapon our Einsteins still can't get a grip on. But I stopped it and I got rid of it. Me and Spock and the crew of the best damn ship in the fleet. And you're convincing me to take on some kinda suicide mission largely because you've got one over me, the protection of someone I particularly care about - - the K'm'anta is not what you're making it out to be. It's not the end of the wuh… world..." Jim slowly stopped talking as his thoughts caught up with his mouth…. and an idea, or an explanation, fought for air against the ebbing tide of hard liquor….

When Jim was a boy, even before he really knew what the word meant, he knew he had a strong and easy sense of intuition. As he grew older he recognized it enough to rely on it; winning over a girl out on a date, knowing which play to call on the field that could lead to either glory or humiliation. But it wasn't until his last year at Riverside High that he gathered what it was that gave him that edge and it wasn't just intuition; it was experience too, learning from experience, and it was something else there was no precise word for. A pretty young teacher, Twentieth Century Lit - - who couldn't have been much older than Jim, he now realized, with thick blonde hair she kept back from her sweet face with a school girl's pony tail had pointed it out to him, his unique style - - that's what she had called it, his style - - his style of smarts. She'd told him once, after he'd angled her to talk after class about his award nominated paper on the novel "Catch-22," from nineteen sixty-one, compared with the popular writing of the contemporary satirist, the deadpan Vulcan T'Chala, with the intentions of offering her the opportunity to relieve him of his teenage virginity - - which, in fact, was long gone - - that she'd run him inside out and knew him better than he did himself. She said it was interesting that he was always asking, rapid-fire, questions that sometimes were seemingly unrelated to one another, sometimes unrelated to the very subject at hand and that he'd suddenly pull the right answer, or sometimes the answer that best suited his circumstance, as if from nowhere.. She'd told him that was an unusual but common quality among many natural leaders; very well-read she'd mentioned names, a couple of which were new to him, or he wasn't sure of at the time - - Isaac Newton, a cowboy lawman Wyatt Earp, the influential social voice at a time of strife, Miss Edith Keeler, the Brit - - Churchill, Indira Ghandi, the speed-of-sound breaker, pilot Chuck Yeagher, the American president Kennedy, the visual artists Pollack and Kubrick, the Vulcan forefather and believer in life elsewhere who charted the course of his world from savagery, Sitar, son of Salak. As a tease for his come on, and also, sinking into him right away, sincere belief in his future, she'd given him a light kiss on the open mouth and said, "You're better than you think you are, Mister Kirk. Get used to it." As a ship's Captain, he never really thought about the workings of his inner life very much but he recognized when he seemed to pull a rabbit from a hat that it wasn't wasn't a trick, there was no magic involved - - just the originality of his damn brain at work. Gods, what was her name, that young, pretty blonde….

"Jim," Eleanor said and though he knew he'd only disappeared inside himself for a passing moment, Eleanor had read an expression that had come over him that even he could not fully explain. "You okay?"

"That thing you mentioned near the start of this - - this briefing," he said, trying his best, as he spoke suddenly and quickly, not to stumble over his own thoughts and words as a result of the booze being burned away by the burst of his natural adrenaline, "About the Klingons these last thirty years, the Covered Wagon theory - - their, uh - - the unprecedented burst of technological advancement in a short period - - from the basic as you can get D-1 A class heavy cruisers to the K't'inga and K'm'anta. It's Orville Wright and Buzz Aldrin - -"

"Yes, what about it - - ?" intentionally making a small show of checking her wrist's chrono-tat.

"Thirty years - - What else happened thirty years ago well, almost exactly thirty years. Twenty-nine?"

"I'll have to check my diary. Jim, I have to go and Carol— Lieutenant Commander Marcus - - What hotel are you at tonight in NYC?"

"Twenty-nine years ago, Admiral? Eleanor."

"What else happened thirty- -twenty-nine years ago," she replied, speaking quickly, done with him for now he could tell. "I don't know. I was gearing up to start my final semester at the Academy. I was admitted a year early and I wasn't even sixteen yet - - Special circumstances - -"

"My dad died almost thirty years ago a few months from now. And I was born in outer space instead of Riverside like my parents were aiming for. Admiral, d'you ever read Chris's thing he wrote? Chris Pike, his dissertation about the Kelvin, and what my dad did, and Nero?"

"Yes, of course. What - -?"

"You ever read the - - what he originally wrote? The first draft? He gave me one of the only copies he still had hidden away just after he first trusted me with the _Enterprise_. His first draft that his professors at the Academy showed to no less than Admiral April? There were pages the Admiral told him to cut for reasons of galactic security. About those years after my dad did what he did, when that huge, bizarre death ship seemed to vanish. Long before the destruction of Vulcan - - where Nero and his men were - - who took possession of the _Narada_ for years and years ? Eleanor - - " And he had grinned in that crooked way that more than hinted at the pleasure he took in his confidence…."The K'm'anta's not just a warship. It's not only a weapon and a warship in one scary package…. It's a time machine."

Eleanor leaned in close and put a hand on his shoulder. "Jim, you're hitting warp speed. How about you lay down. Just for a while?"

Jim smoothly pulled away, letting out a short, pent up breath. "I got a girl waiting' for me in an old hotel in New York. A beautiful woman with short, thick, soft blonde hair and wide mismatched eyes I could fall into and happily drown and legs that don't quit. And a brain that's faster than mine and yet she laughs at nearly all my jokes. Nearly. And for her own damn good, I'm gonna have to break her heart." He moved around her and out of the den to the hallway which let out to vestibule and the front door.

Eleanor followed him, stopping just out of the den. "Jim, a time machine? Thirty-one considered something like that. It was third or fourth on their list of possibles the first time they saw what the DUMBO gave us."

"You've known that this whole time. Figures. Had me put on a show for you, give my ego a spin so I'd commit to - - whatever this really is?"

"Jim," she said letting out a long pent up breath of her own and he privately marveled at her handle on all that McCutcheon's. "Jim Kirk, you're nobody's fool. And it is what it is. And there's only one problem with that typical flash of your usually on-target insight when it comes to an adversary's motives this time. It's a very simple problem - - Not that it's something you should have known already. It's just, well…" Letting that dangle, she'd approached him and had opened the front door with a slight, silent gesture; a small nod that gave him permission to leave. He lingered for a moment, waiting….

"The Klingons don't believe in time travel."


	19. Chapter 19

Bullshit."

"I'm sorry, Jim?"

"You're seriously going to try and convince me that the Klingons - - all of them - - you're saying none of them believe in time tra - -? That's like saying they don't believe in - - in communicators. They don't believe in transporters - - !"

"You put it like that, your point is - - "

"Hell, I've done it three times so far in a very short career. And, like me, you're one of the few people who knows a number of lives were all subtly changed in ways most people will never realize as a result of time travel - - "

"As well as some pretty out there quantum happenst - -"

"It's provable, going back in time, despite the paradoxes which - - in my experiences - - always seem to work themselves out. I don't know - - I'm not a quantum specialist. But it's a fact. It is something you can prove. Factually. Uh, objectively."

"Yes, Jim. You're right."

"I am?"

"A hundred percent."

"Of course I am. I think time travel became a real thing the moment - - Hell, the nanosecond Cochrane broke the warp barrier. Every school kid on Earth, anyway, understands that's the time-space continuum. That's basic. Or, in their case - - What was the name of their Cochrane? Kazak? Kojak - -?"

"Kajizik."

"Damn Kling names all start sounding the same."

"Those Earth kids, as well as alien children all across our space, they go to Zefram Cochrane public schools - - I went to Cochrane High in Butte - - and our school kids learn about Cochrane breaking the barrier and all the great things he did when hitting Warp One opened his mind to all the possibilities that led to our noble experiment, the United Federation of Planets. You know what happened to Kajizik?"

"I don't remember - -"

"Nobody does. Shortly after he had privately published the account of his discovery, allegedly more of a math text than glory-houndin' autobiography, he disappeared. His name was stricken from all public, military, and secret science records. Every photo of him, every painting, every holo'film was said to have gone up in a fire that destroyed his Clan's estate and left behind dangerous traces of atomic waste. Today, if you ask a Klingoni from one of their indoctrination grade school , their K'm'rad'Siik, all the way up through their military Academies, who Kajizik was, they'll have no idea who you're talking about. You ask them not who discovered Warp space, but how was it discovered, they answer, as one, "tlhIngan maH !" We are Klingons."

"Never wanted to be a Klingon when I grew up."

"My point is, Jim - - Well, as you know, having made your feelings clear, there was an attempt within Starfleet - - after Vengeance and Harrison - - to shut down Thirty-One. I understood that desire - - without agreeing with it. Once I assumed Alex's position as Commander, Starfleet - - temporarily I'd thought - - Thirty-One division fell under my direct control. I had them continue developing new cutting - edge defensive technologies but suggested a greater emphasis on the study of the cultures, the politics and social weaknesses of our obvious and potential adversaries in the our exploration of deep space and the expansion of the UFP. The Romulan star empire, the Gorn systems, the so-called First Federation, and now, thanks largely to you, the Orion Oligarchy And, of course, first and foremost Alex Marcus's personal bete noir, that he just happened to be so very, very right about., the Klingoni- - "

"Wait a minute, Eleanor- - Admiral. Alexander Marcus was many things but- - "

"Save your heroic display of indignation for that ingrate daughter of his, James."

"How 'bout you spare me the schooling and make your damn point then. And by the way, next time you talk about Carol Marcus with disrespect, I'll deck ya. Eleanor - - you taking away my Starfleet Grade 'n all., I got nothing to lose. Now, I have no intention of making her wait for me alone at the Arms' Algonquin bar and you're already five minutes late for your meeting and if there's one thing a Tellar Boar hates more than an Earther female with authority is one wh- - "

"Is one who keeps a Boar waiting, as if she were actually in charge. My point is this: in addition to some espionage work that - - well, it left me astounded, their sophistication and eye for detail, I'll get you a precis of their actionable intel - - the research they found most useful in understanding the Kling, for strategizing an effective defense, was actually a very well-read , award-winning unclassified study that really ignited the popular imagination with a reborn interest in xenology, a micro-book I believe you are very familiar with - -"

Jim fought the exasperation, failed, let it out with a long breath... " 'Iw vo' Qul."

"Despite its broad appeal," the Admiral said with a cynical frown and a measure of weary humor, "every worthwhile specialist in the field, even the Vulcans, felt it the most insightful, and incisive, study of the Klingon way. Their culture, their history - - their actual history. You know what I mean? The way they have - - literally - - no choice but to assume what they are told is truth? That kind of history? Jim?"

Jim looked at her ruefully and, now more than ever, ready to leave. Ready to be with her, with Carol, aware more than ever before of one of his life's recurring lessons - - that the things most important to him, the people, everything, could be taken from him so goddamn incredibly fast. No matter how ready for the fight he was.

"Yeah, sure. I understand, I oughtta- -" he answered, with a casual shrug and a nod, doing his best to seem disaffected. "I spent the summer after my second semester at Riverside High proofing it for her."

Of course, with its sociological bent, his mom's xenological break through tape-book, " 'Iw vo Qul,". didn't touch at all on time travel. But he had understood what Parker was alluding to with her references to Klingon history. Winona Kirk had written with unprecedented clarity, and without having ever been a hundred parsecs in the vicinity of Kronos, or even an actual Klingon, how the events of near about the last one hundred years - that history, essential to her thesis - - had affected how the Klingon thought. She'd made plain both a day to day common mindset and also terms of their sense of selves in a decidedly cruel universe and the way that thinking found practical expression... unquestioning obedience to authority, unquestioning belief in the dogma of behavioral codes and irrational racial, or species-based, pride - - which heightened disgust for their enemies' differences - - a benefit from authority's special insight, the unquestioning subsuming of ego, personality, any demonstration of individuality, into their world's sense of purpose and its destiny... as determined by authority.

Of course the Klingons knew time travel was possible, but that didn't mean they had to "believe" in it. Not the powers in control of their populations; it simply didn't "fit." Of course, out of their questionably honorable and noble tradition, they made their belief clearly understood as a desire to always keep moving forward, to never look back. The past was the past; it was what had been done and progressed from. And despite their suppression of any and all religious beliefs, or mythological leanings (save those given formal stamps of approval) that sense of forward thinking more than suggested a society driven by "destiny." Destiny made Manifest.

But that left something unanswered, something basic that he'd finally raised on the mad passage to Gateway... What had caused the powerfully elite technocrats who had, more or less, over the past one hundred Earth years - - by Winona Kirk's Pulitzer-winning calculations - - ruled with a "kill first, don't bother to ask questions later" brand of totalitarianism, to alter one of their basic political tenants? Why did they take on a complex time travel scheme as a means of presumably launching a war with Earth and the Federation? And why the Vietnam war, and specifically, the entry of the forces of the then "United States" in a disreputable, disputable and disorienting event?

Lingering over those thoughts, and others... thinking about his mother, whom he hadn't talked to in months... all these things that kept flickering in the back of his mind, lazily, behind his mission specifics in the here and now - - "Damn... I really wanted her to meet Carol... they might have even been friendly... and I'd told Carol I'd arrange getting us all together, that I'd get a hold of mom, and Maddie and even Sam whom Carol had met briefly once during a brief layover at Deneva, somehow, that we'd meet in Riverside" - - Jim had abruptly felt his insides lurch a little, the muscles in his legs bunching up into muscular hardness as his body maintained its balance.

The deck of the Nautilus had angled up as the sub slowly adjusted its bearing in relation to the La Fayette once again.

Jim could see why through the computer station's viewer in the utility room just off the Nautilus bridge. With every pass around the strange monster-thing, the Navy submarine altered course, moving closer and closer.

He'd heard a light rap at the utility room's door, a rhythmic knocking that Jim took to be a signal, and he saw, peripherally, Maria quickly open it, allowing Gary Mitchell in and closing the door immediately behind him. Mitch and the Agents slipped immediately into a strategical appraisal laced with anxious urgency and masked, nearly, with professional cool. Jim ignored them, and their voices became background sound, a buzz that nonetheless punched through his concentration on the K'm'anta and registered in his thinking - - "time factor" and details related to the responsibilities each would assume in the planned "engine breach" intended to get the crew off the boat, somewhere safe and nowhere near where they might see the otherworldly battleship from three hundred years in the future.

Jim's concentration remained fixed on the private viewer's screen that allowed for a sharp image of the K'm'anta and flickering data that those pods he'd seen along the sub's hull while he was drawn to the Nautilus, gathered and filtered. His attention had just buoyed. When the Nautilus had adjusted attitude to match the LaFayette's course change, he'd gotten his first, good close, practical look at the Klingon vessel's vast and imposing underside. All of the dimensional blueprints and stolen test flight holos hadn't quite imparted the mammoth spread of the intermix chamber's distension, nor the complexity, the intricacy of the practical shields, designed and laid out in a pattern he suspected was meaningful in some way that even the specialists in Thirty-One likely hadn't bothered with. He remembered his parting words with Eleanor after that first meeting, when all the implications came down on him at once - - less of the mission he'd been offered than her simple certainty in what he thought she took special pleasure in stating... "You'll never step on a starship bridge again." The light rain was, he sensed, going to break open and become a downfall. But he moved out into it anyway, glancing back as she was closing the door behind her He'd called to her, a thought in passing, a looking across the neighborhood and seeing he was alone. "Why K'm'anta?"

"What do you mean?"

"The name, I'm guessing they named it K'm'anta for a reason. Name of a ship - - It can be important, Especially a prototype. Especially a prototype built as the turning point in their grand delusion of conquering all of the Federated worlds."

She'd shrugged, suggesting it may just be a technical term regarding the vessel's classification, like K't'inga, and told him she'd put a translator in Thirty-One on it . But she also told him flatly that he had much more pressing and important immediate concerns and then she'd closed the door, and he walked along the Presidio in the rain.

"Jim? What do you think?" He glanced up from the viewer at Gary Mitchell's question. Studying the K'm'anta, he'd lost track of their discussion but from what he had heard, he could piece together Mitch's plans for dropping Jim as close as possible to the target even as he ran a course away from what would be an imminent explosion - - and a doozy at that; Mitchell had never shown much imagination but in this instance, with his assignment, being a practical sonofabitch was likely beneficial. None the less, and for no immediately apparent reason, Jim had felt it necessary to make any possible personal connection with his old friend and offered, what he expected Gary to know, was some hard won advice from more than his share of dangerous interstellar stand-offs and out-and-out combat.

"If you're going to go all out with the Rockets Red Glare, you're going to have to adapt to circumstances, time and place. And from what Toad told me, you're not crewed up with the cream of the twentieth century crop," Jim said; he'd picked up Gary's fundamental source for readying the Nautilus' get-up-and-go stratagem the moment he'd opened his mouth - - Rockets Red Glare was every freshman cadet's first somewhat complicated simulator maneuver as a pilot at helm - - everyone had to do it at least once - - and it helped instructors keep the kids with some talent in mind for duty training.

"We're set, Jim," Gary had answered, his assuring tone a bit of a surprise as Kirk had half-expected him to take offense as he had earlier. Jim nodded and had glanced a Roger.

"You got any surprises up your sleeve in terms of weaponry?"

Roger nodded in a way that wasn't quite convincing, more a bobbing of his head. He had gone on, explaining, "If the Klingons fire on us, yes. The American Navy sub, I don't think that would be smart. For obvious reasons."

"Yeah," Jim replied. The others had immediately broken into a discussion regarding their unforseen problems, notably all the problems the shape of the American Navy nuclear submarine. Even if the K'm'anta was lifeless, Kirk was still ordered to destroy it, preferably, necessarily with the LaFayette neither in the kill zone nor even visual range of the mystery-thing's destruction. The LaFayette also was likely equipped with exterior mounted cameras, for stills and some basic motion pictures. Jim had known he could have jumped into their cool, dispassionate argument, could have told them, from experience, that they had little to worry about in that regard, in regard to the quality of any recorded image... but he'd turned his attention back to the computer's viewer. And the K'm'anta.

He'd been stuck working against another problem, one he had felt uncertain to raise with the others - - namely the details and, in fact, the possibility of his surviving what was, indeed, looking more and more like a suicide mission the closer he came to actually getting underway.

He'd chosen two possible entry points on the K'm'anta. One was a hexagonal air lock that, according to the holo'prints Thirty-One secured from one of their Orions, an engineer, opened into a likely unoccupied storage room; the other, a hastily repaired breach at the join of the ship's "neck" to the secondary section, likely a result of a rough descent and crash landing into the sea after the unpredictable tumult of time travel. Of course those choices were, essentially, best case, and purely theoretical, scenarios; there were so many unanswered questions and possibilities... Were the Klingons on board alive or dead? Perhaps there were a limited number of survivors. If so, what condition were they in? By nature Jim would likely feel some compunction to aid the badly injured, by training and the specifics of his mission, he'd destroy the K'm'anta and any living thing aboard it with barely a spare thought. What if the crew had survived, even in part, but their vessel was beyond repair? He had had a hard enough time imagining himself living a life on the Earth of the latter half of the twentieth century and had imagined it was, in a word, unlikely the a crew of likely all-male warrior-alien"spacemen" would either. Hell his future might be as simple and stupid as being spotted and killed in some manner as he attempted entry to his target.

He'd run those questions so many times now, they were like a mantra or a repetitive pop song. Now that he was ready to light that candle, his greater concern was his escape before the Klingon warship exploded, imploded and vaporized.

Assuming he made it aboard, that air lock in particular would put him in relatively easy striking distance of one of what the Thirty One engineers had translated from stolen M-Glyphs as a "power station." This set-up was different than the designs of any Klingon vessel that Starfleet Intelligence had ever gotten a hold of before. The K'm'anta was powered by an "energy lattice" that covered every centimeter of the weapons and engineering section, crackling alive within the bulkheads. There were, if Thirty-One's engineering group was reading the holo'prints correctly, nine "power stations" positioned and fixed throughout that section of the ship which were each designed to be run by three operators to keep the unusual and unstable high power generated via those two pylons outboard and atop, in balance with the standard matter-anti-matter mix in that wide bulbous warp chamber spread across the rear underside of the broad hull ... the energy lattice, the power stations, the two unusual pylons that were likely connected in some way to the artificially created vortex that had allowed the K'm'anta to pass through time - - there was an unspoken suspicion among some of the Thirty Ones Jim had encountered on the rushed passage to Gateway that while the K'm'anta was pure Klingon in terms of intentions and strategy, it's guts and its brain bore all the latest Orion breakthroughs in ultra-high speed, heavily weaponized space vehicles. But that had come as little surprise to Jim And it had, disconcertingly seemed of little interest to Admiral Parker from the start.

Theoretically, once he'd made it to that power station - - and if Roger and Maria provided him the small brick of Bee-Zee-Tee he'd assured Eleanor Parker was the best plastic explosive for the operation, the rest was just crossing the i's and dotting the t's. He just had to find a clear flat or even slightly curved surface on which he could affix the explosive and spear it with a small stick of ketamite. The ketamite was a manufactured substance but its source was arboreal, the wood from a single astonishingly monstrous tree with a system of roots that sprouted into virtual forests, taking up a small northern equatorial continent on Runymede. The wood had the strange capacity of bursting into flame for any number of random reasons - - temperature changes, heavy rainfall of all things. Simply, it made for a natural fuse. Eleanor had suggested that he break a stick of it into the smallest pieces possible and plunge that fistful into the Bee-Zee-Tee to assure instant destruction; hence, the suicide in "suicide mission," Jim had mused at the time.

But as he had organized and ran various game plans in those last days with Carol, hating himself for even letting his thoughts wander to the job when he knew he'd see her soon, too soon, for the last time, and, after the curling smoke of "Ole Know-t-All," as the Federation researchers had taken to calling The Gaurdian had cleared and he'd arrived in an alley, almost inexplicably in 1964 Seattle, Washington, in the weeks it took him to follow the proverbial, breadcrumbs that somehow got him to Pearl and the USS Ticonderoga and in his time aboard her almost enjoying tearing up the skies over South East Asia on training runs and recons in that antique jet fighter, pretending as much as was possible, or wise, that none of it was real, he'd come to realize, slyly alluding to the idea with Toad who hadn't caught on, that this wasn't a suicide mission at all. Or it didn't have to be. If he were judicious with the ketamite and depending on the variables, such as the need to defend himself, he could break off a piece of the fuse that would give him, say, sixty seconds to make it to the nearest possible escape route off the ship or, worst case, some place he could take cover... because there was little about Bee-Zee -Tee that wasn't going to make at least sixty-six seconds of his life about as close to an eternity in Hell as a human could imagine possible.

The explosion would occur in two stages. The instant the ketamite ignited into flame and the flame had barely brushed the Bee-Zee-Tee, it would burst into a fireball over one hundred meters in diameter and produce heat so intense, it would melt metal and turn anything else in range instantly to cinder and ash. That first blast would likely set off smaller explosions and the ship's hidden energy lattice would carry the fire throughout the K'm'anta's guts that would culminate in the detonation of the other eight power stations in a devastating chain reaction. Once the explosions settled, leaving fires everywhere and a thick cloud of smoke, stage two, which had originally been an unexpected side effect in the creation of the Bee-Tee-Zee, would begin and it was unstoppable.

That hanging smoke would go through a metamorphosis, first becoming a poison that enlarged the trachea, producing pressure that shut down and crushed the lungs of any oxygen-breathing life form. But it didn't end there. The smoke would continue to transform and quickly become vapor and as it thinned, the vapor grew hot. And hotter. The Bee-Tee-Zee vapor would, in less than fifteen minutes, reach a temperature greater than the lava from the deep sea mountain ranges jutting across the volcanic ocean floors of Obsidia. And in twenty minutes, it would be as if the K'm'anta had never existed.

Staring at the vessel through the computer's viewer, Jim ran the course of his escape. Breaking the ketamite to a length longer than Parker had ordered but not so much that would allow any of the enemy the opportunity to defuse it. Depending on circumstances, he'd make for the way he got aboard or one of the alternatives he'd considered. And if he'd didn't make it off, he'd find cover behind a thick bulkhead outside the primary blast perimeter. The detonation would likely provide any any number of significant cracks in the hull and it would probably be simple to get away. But he'd have to swim hard, though, as he had no idea how the vessel would react to the Earth's sea water as it vaporized unfamiliar elements of the Klingon starship's construction and the large inferior grade dilithium crystals used to power its warp field. He may also have to deal with any Klingon soldiers who'd managed to abandon ship.

That accomplished - - well, he hadn't bought into that suicide mission nonsense from the beginning of this mission. Except... except...

Even surviving the K'm'anta's destruction and its erasure from existence may prove it hadn't been a matter of suicide, it was, in fact, just a very long, very slow death beyond his control.

He'd be alone, somewhere in the northern reaches of the South China Sea, three hundred years before he ever existed. It was highly unlikely that the Nautilus would return if Gary could work the Rockets' Red Glare. Mitchell and the Agents would then have to play whatever scenario Mitch had figured would get the hired contemporary crew off the sub and then the sub itself would have to be thoroughly scuttled in a way that allowed Mitch, Maria and Roger their disappearing act - - whatever it may be. The Agents also likely had one of their mysterious gadgets that could perform their magic and pass for a timely transistor radio, one that could get a read on the target's destruction; they had no need of visual confirmation... The nearest of the Vietnamese islands, part of a chain that marked a five mile boundary from the mainland of the North and meant, mainly, for the American Navy, would be, by Jim's careful calculation, a six or seven mile swim. Not impossible - - if he were back in 2262, on extended leave somewhere warm or outright hot,, on Xunan, maybe, where the unending ocean off the almost silver beach felt like a perpetual massage, he'd swim those seven miles after a deeper than deep sleep following a night of energetic, athletic, aggressively crazy and defiantly shameless lovemaking,with a slice of kink, going all-out to pleasure his Weapons Chief, his Goddess, with her short, blonde bobbed hair that curled at the cut, her wide eyes just slightly mismatched in color suggesting her mysterious soul and the wider smile that lit him up, a body that was all perfect soft curves and rock hard fitness and those legs he'd die for, her ankles a masterly stroke of a true artist's brush and a laugh that could eat him alive.

But the reality, that he'd be in the Gulf of Tonkin the afternoon of August the fourth in the year nineteen sixty-four, hours from the official outbreak of a historically important war,, a significant event that he'd have to keep in place, was all topped by his afterwards. He'd find himself alone with an oxygen tank he suspected the agents had altered to give him a full hour - - which he could stretch another ten minutes from standard Starfleet survival training and the even more complex exercises he'd learned at the S-SEAL special division in Command school at the Academy.

Those experiences, his Command training, somehow led him to another idea for salvation that he found difficult to entirely dismiss. He could play the part of exactly what he was, in a way - - a crew member of the carrier Ticonderoga gone overboard during the chaos set off by Toad's explosive. That would take a lot of dancing, more than even he was used to. Regardless of whomever had contacted the Orions about his presence aboard - - he'd assumed they were time traveling compatriots of the K'm'anta's crew - - he would already have had the attention of U.S. Navy Command and they likely could make a guess that he was somehow involved with the believed "sabotage" on the Ticonderoga. No matter which vessel he could get taken aboard, his name, his file and copies of his I.D. photo was likely in the hands of Warrant Officers across the seventh fleet. Still, even if he were arrested, he'd likely. eventually, find himself on dry land where more options could be worked to his advantage, particularly if that magic of his found some purchase on a mission that was dangerously slipping beyond him.

No... No, there was only one other possibility that could secure his safety from an eventual ignoble demise in the South China Sea and even promised a way home, to his time, and his place. Unfortunately, even he had to admit to himself it was, at the very best, a long shot and what was worse, for him, it was something entirely outside of his control. The starship, his starship, the U.S.S. Enterprise could possibly - - possibly - - emerge from the glaring reflection of the sun off the Tonkin water from seemingly out of nowhere, from the future... his crew, his friends, his family, really, devoted to finding him, and likely defying Starfleet and, specifically, the order of the CNC, Admiral Eleanor Parker herself, and following the dead set orders of two of their obsessive Commanders, the only two genuine geniuses in life... his first mate and half-alien brother and beside him, his personal scientific Cassandra and the Mistress of his heart, his body, his soul. They'll be standing on opposite sides of his command chair, knowing that's where he belongs. She'd likely have not allowed anyone sit there til he came back. Bones would be in sickbay, ordering his people around to make sure they were prepared whatever state he arrived in while he scanned South East Asia for signs of duerillium, a metal found only on Andor within the Federation and used in medical practice; he'd rebuilt three of his ribs with it after she had saved him on Idar. Nyota would be listening to both the North Vietnamese military's and the U.S. Navy's transmissions and, if it helped hinder both sides from even thinking they saw some U.F.O. and interfere with their rescue, she'd broadcast an untraceable, very high-pitched noisy futz that would temporarily cause all communications within five hundred square miles to go deaf. Scotty would signal Sulu when his engines were ready for a full impulse atmospheric descent, and Sulu, with Chekov's energetic, bright confidence, would skim the ship across the sea for an emergency transport and split second getaway-ascent... then they'd barrel roll to Sol and slingshot around 'er and he'd be home in time to take 'em all, the whole damn crew, to a big, big dinner and all-night drink up at Russert's Bar and Texas Steakhouse on Wacker in Dubuque.

"Jim," stop being silly," he could imagine Carol telling him. "Just think straight and clear, forget the nonsense, and think in that way of yours. You'll come home that way, to the Enterprise. To me. And I think you know why there is no other option for you... Don't you? Well..."

He could imagine her staring at him, waiting with a hint of impatience that he knew just how to milk, 'til she smiled and it was the same smile from when they first met on that shuttle and she had very happily and easily sat beside him at his invitation...

"Jim, you're going to do only what you can do and then you're coming home because - -"

And in his head, he heard his voice join in with hers, saying, firmly, strongly, "I'm James T. Goddamn Kirk- - "

"Jim?"

Jim glanced up from the hooded viewer.

Mitchell. He was looking down at Jim hunched over the screen and so Kirk shifted and had stretched his back but still leaned close by the viewer. Jim flicked a look past Gary and saw Roger and Maria, more or less where they had been, passing a curious small black device back and forth, each making adjustments to it.

Good gods, Jim had thought, Carol Marcus really had his number; all those occasions she had either laughed or had grown angry with his unbreakable tendency, when not occupied by actions to be taken, his losing himself in his thoughts. Sometimes extremely lost. Mitchell hadn't moved away from him and the Agents were still talking details of their getaway plans. He'd been so lost, any sense of time was frozen. But time had kicked in as it always did and he knew damn well what Mitchell was waiting for him to ask.

"Time to go?"

Gary had nodded slowly. "You make it sound like it's just another job. Another day at the office. But then again, I know you. Better than you think. And I've also read nearly every mission report you've ever logged, so I half-think that you probably really do think of of it as any other assignment - -"

"Isn't it? I mean, except for the suicide part."

Gary screwed on a smile as Jim stretched his neck and rolled back his head, asking as he groaned, "How long before you light it up? The Red Glare?"

"Less than an hour," he said, then checked his era-appropriate wristwatch, adding, "Forty-nine minutes to be exact. It's very strange. The Klingons seem stuck on the idea of running whatever you want to call their intent - - their assault, maybe? - - they're fixed on sticking to the recorded official history of these events. Despite the fact that that history was discounted centuries ago. Even by the people that originally recorded it."

"And that I've already messed up by giving history an actual event to record," Jim replied with an indifferent amusement that took even him by surprise.

"Well, according to Martin and Lewis there," Gary said, glancing back at the Agents,"Toad's fireworks? The aftereffects, historically, turn out to be negligible at worst. And no fatalities, human that is. The not-so-little green men were zapped into nonexistence .

"They must have discovered the two dead thugees in my cabin?" Jim asked and was shrugged off in response.

"They say they couldn't find a thing about them, not in any report or record, even, they claim, the Central Intelligence files- - don't ask me how they found out."

"I wasn't planning to," Jim said, flicking a look over at them as well. " And I shouldn't really trust them. I'm just gambling they're as legitimately helpful as they seem. They've given me no reason not to." He turned back to Gary with a slightly puzzled frown. "Martin and Lewis? I don't- -"

"They're - -," Gary started. Then he waved it off. Jim, understanding, proceeded in his command style, speaking aloud as he was - - informedly - - thinking his ideas through..

"The Klingons being stuck, as you put it, on the historical rec - - Gary," Jim said, as he thoughtfully determined another path to follow. "Have you ever heard of the Heg pow, or poe?" Jim made no attempt at the proper Klingoni pronunciation - - Hegh poH - -and stayed with a phonetically Basic approximation.

Gary shook his head but listened with great attention. Section Thirty-One had drawn from him more incisive thoughts, as well as a honed ability to obfuscate, deceive, and even how to easily cheat and win playing poker, but he knew, as he always had, Jim Kirk suspected, that the Iowa farmboy was out of his league and totally his own man with what was distinctly his own way. Jim had pushed on, almost ignoring Mitchell's response, trying to keep pace with his ideas as he organized them into talking points.

"Heg Poe, it's the current ruling government's idea of higher thinking. Klingon philosophy, if you want to call it that - - without laughing - - but dig just a little deeper and its really just a sociological version of a very basic approach to space combat . The literal translation of Heg Poe is kill time or killing time. Meaning - - "

"Meaning," Gary said interrupting and seamlessly continuing Jiim's argument, like back when they were bird dogging the ladies of Alpha Omega, Jim remembered with an inner sly grin, the off-Academy elite sorority of Cadets who'd gone to the same group of equally elite girls' boarding schools on Earth, "that with a little patience and viigilance, a good kill comes to those that wait?"

"That's one way of putting it but it's all a lotta bullshit, this idea that you attain a higher sense of purpose when you destroy an enemy - - not as soon as you can - - but at the exact perfect moment. And that higher sense of purpose? That's knowing one's place in serving their "empire"."

"Not meaning to seem the racist, the Ugly Federationalist, but I prefer the human take on that idea."

"Which is what?," Jim asked, with a slight smile. Maybe Mitch hadn't changed all that much from the surfin' bird.

"Que sera, sera..."

Jim nodded, his smirk growing, as he offered another, more likely possibility that was in his mind all along about the Klingon's precise choices in this unique - - for them - - way of essentially trying to win a war launched at the Federation and Starfleet, not simply without a battle but before the war even began.

"The most... logical... explanation," he said, almost tripping over his choice of words, changing his tack, "Look, you Thirty-Ones believe the Kling have never attempted time travel? Supposing you're right, then they're probably thinking just like they're told to from childhood - - strategically. Time travel's a mystery for them. They'd never admit it but they're likely scared to death of screwing the pooch and somehow erasing their empire from existence."

Mitchell swallowed a chuckle but couldn't his smile.

"If you're anticipating a punchline, they're isn't one."

"No, no. I uh- - I was just thinking, like mother, like son," Gary said with his unreadable icy smile. Jim stared at him askance but as he began asking what the hell Gary had meant by that, Mitchell was holding up a hand and assumed his usual matter-of-fact bearing that, Jim knew for a fact, had never fooled Hot Lips Dehner. "It figures Parker didn't tell you. If it weren't for advancement protocols and the pull she inherited from Mad Man Marcus, Starfleet couldn't have been forced to promote a worse commandant."

"What's your point, Mitch? Why'd you mention my mom?"

"Parker brought Ms. Winona Morrison, married name Winona Kirk - - which she still gets plenty of mileage out of, by the way - - into this very early, when pretty much all we had was the name K'm'anta slipped to us by an Orion, one of their Plutarchs - - fat, devious son of a bitch, name of Klimt, I think."

Jim tried not to show any reaction to the name, realized he was trying, then just sounded the curse in his head - - or was this apparently unintended revelation just another coincidence? "Ain't no such thing as a bad coincidence, kid," he remembered Grandpa Jim telling him more than once during his brief, albeit horrific, summer on Tarses. And later that same year, during school break, he'd helped Winona by proofreading her goddamn Klingon book.

"This Orion had shown us he was reliable more than a few times, like with what happened on Cathar, and that situation with the Kling jihadiis. He even gave us a few clues that put all of us here, told us there was scuttlebutt floating 'round the high families of Orion Prime about a Fed red-level diplomatic sciences pack that had gone missing en rote to Earth from Gateway and that it connected with a contract in the works for the Klingons who wanted Orion space specialists to sort out a few warp field problems with a new starship they were calling, at that time, the Qav qutluch, the ultimate or final weapon. Klimt also told us that the contract was said to include a provision for poH leng - - or, time travel - -"

"Well, we're here and it's now. My mother Gary- -?"

Jim could clearly see that Mitchell was regretting mentioning it; but he wasn't going to let the Thirty-One Mitch had clearly become, with his glee so evident when it came to deep cover talk, off easy. Gary took in a deep breath and blew it out as he replied, "Jim, when Thirty-One gets an assignment, we talk to just about everyone who knows more than we do. Your mom's book is still an important study of Klingon culture, and her work with other beings, species, races is pretty staggering. She's also got a good brain when it comes to figuring out how to relate to other cultures and with the Klingons, and even moreso the Roms, her advice is pretty unrelenting. strong - - even merciless - - stuff. A couple of us were given her logs and recommendations to go over before she came to talk to us. And Winiona Kirk is a lady of no compromises. " He paused a moment, and said again," Like mother, like son," as if it explained itself.

Jim shook his head lightly, saying, "My mother is not an agent for Section Thirty-One. Come on!"

"If it'll make this mission go any easier for you, she's an extremely low level interest, much lower than you, Jim. You're deep in the shit," Gary said almost tiredly. "She's what we call a contract agent. Hell, when she came to our Q and A arranged by Admiral Screw Loose, she had no idea who or what we even were. Parker didn't lie. She just told Missus Kirk we were a new specialized branch of Starfleet security, a think tank." He added, as if it would help an old friend, "It's not an unusual means of information sharing, and that's really what Thirty-One's about, Jim. Information. As a very effective weapon against our enemies. And the longer we're in space, boldly pushing the frontier, the more enemies we get. Your mom, she's a real ace, Jim."

At Jim's look, fed up, exasperated, Gary went to say more but Kirk shook his head to visible Mitchell's relief. "You've got your enemies, Mister Mitchell. My enemy's time," Jim said, steering their discussion to the task at hand. "Gary, listen, if you think you can light the Rockets' Red Glare underwater with mostly twentieth century tech, maybe you should consider manning the helm yours- - "

"Jim. Jim," Gary interrupted, his voice going low but notably strong. "I've been thinking about this from the moment I heard you'd taken this mission. We've left a lot unsaid because, frankly, I wanted to see if you measured up the reports and logs I'd read. I figured you would and I'm not disappointed. Jim, I've left too much unsaid- -"

"Gary, we don't have that kind of time. You want me to forgive you for dropping out and playing dead, you're forgiven. Look, we just knew each other for a pretty short time at the Academy, a long time ago- -"

"No!" Gary practically whispered it as a hiss, stepping closer to Kirk. "Time... Time means nothing, Jim. Not to any of us. And especially not to me."

Jim started to pull back and away from Gary but Mitchell clamped a hand on his shoulder and pressed in even closer, leaning in toward Kirk's ear, and, in a way that that the Agents couldn't overhear, he said, "I can get us back home, Jim. It will cause me certain- -" He struggled for the right word and continued, weakly, "- - difficulties. Physically, mentally, but I'll be buying the next round at Hammerhead's."

Gary Mitchell had then reached to his dark glasses - - Jim instinctively took a half, uncertain step back - -

And a small red soft-button on the computer board by the view screen apparatus started flashing rapidly accompanied by a subdued but insistent beeping, an alarm, and an asexual electronic computerized voice spouting out strings of numbers that meant nothing to Jim.

He brushed by Gary, pushing him a little out of the way, and bent back over viewer, aware that Roger and Maria had crowded in. Jim flicked the quickest of glances at Roger, saw he'd tilted his head back a little, his mouth moving without saying anything and Jim quickly realized he was making sense of the nonsense the the computer was reciting. But Jim's concentration was fixed on the screen.

A slightly fuzzed black shape was moving past his line of sight. The American nuclear boat, LaFayette. It was closer to the Nautilus now; it must have altered course while on the other side of the K'm'anta, Jim had thought, and perhaps that had caused the computer to go on edge. A proximity alert. As the Lafayette banked for a farther pass on their mystery shape, Jim had noticed a smear of red doppled along its surface, at an angle, tilted away from the viewer that only revealed a wash of color from what had to be a nav light atop the sub in the vicinity of its conning tower and bridge section. But Jim was certain there hadn't been any running lights visible and working anywhere on the LaFayette.. And he was proven right.

As the LaFayette cleared his eye line, he got another good , clear look at the K'm'anta... And the source of that blood red red light clearly wasn't coming off any navigation beacons on the American sub...

Jim had, straightening from the scanner screen, grabbed Maria's shoulder as he moved fast for the heavy locked utility room door., pulling her with him...

Roger snapped at him, "Mister Kirk.- -"

Jim ignored him. He stood by Maria, urging her on without words as she found the tiny disk in one of her pockets and pressed it against the door that sprung open immediately without any locks and punch codes to slow them. Jim pulled the thick door wider and finally looked back at Roger and Gary Mitchell, and said, "Gary, scramble this crew of yours. Now. Roger, gear up your bag of tricks. We're out of time,"

TO BE CONTINUED...


	20. Chapter 20 EMERGENCY DEEP

For some reason, I am finding it impossible to copy n-paste the latest chapter here. If you wish to read it, please go to Archive of Our Own and search for it by title, Star Trek Beyond Forever.

I realize this is irregular and if I can figure out what's wrong, I will be posting it here as usual and as well.

Thank-you

JD (author)


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